


in the navy (yes you can put your mind at ease)

by ElbridgeGerry



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, I just really wanted to see the rogues hang out with the rogues if you know what i mean, M/M, Post-ANH, john le queeré, minor Rebels spoilers, the gang's all here, we love a little bi solidarity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:53:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22335115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElbridgeGerry/pseuds/ElbridgeGerry
Summary: After the destruction of the Death Star, the old Rogues meet the soon-to-be Rogues.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso, Wedge Antilles/Luke Skywalker, background chirrut/baze
Comments: 30
Kudos: 65





	1. Chapter 1

Cassian is practiced at controlling his facial expressions. Years in the intelligence service have given him an almost preternatural control over his face, so it knocks Jyn out of her daydreaming to see him roll his eyes so melodramatically. Chirrut chatters away, either unaware or uninterested in Cassian’s abrupt mood change. Jyn sets her bread down on her tray, mouths “what?” to Cassian before deciding she’s too impatient to wait for his reply, and turns to look behind her. She instantly recognises the subject of Cassian’s ire: the pilots. 

They’ve entered the mess as a group. An undulating mass of compact, good looking young people. They’re all around her age she reckons, but there’s a lightness, a naïveté that shrouds them that Jyn has never had the luxury of wearing. They have the sort of confidence to them that comes from either being pedigreed, or the polar opposite. Most of them are imperial defectors — some of them obviously intended for the officer class after academy graduation — who now revel in the ragged sexiness of being rebel pilots. For some of the others, recruited from the dregs of galactic society in the Outer Rim and other wasteland planets, being a rebel pilot brings more excitement in a single day cycle than they’d have experience in a lifetime at home. In many ways, they represent the best of the rebellion, the limitless hope and the joy and excitement of all that they’re fighting for. 

But Jyn has never had time for that bullshit. She doesn’t share Cassian’s abject hatred for them, but she, too, rolls her eyes before turning away. 

“They’re not that bad!” insists Bodhi, cutting across Chirrut. It’s no secret that Bodhi wants to join them — once his hands heal and he’s medically cleared for duty he _will_ join them, but the waiting seems to be killing him. Cassian again rolls his eyes, looking personally affronted by the thought of having to recognise even one of the merits of the rebellion’s pilots. 

“Yes that’s true,” Jyn says before Cassian can speak, a paltry attempt at keeping the peace. Jyn quirks her eyebrow at Cassian, challenging him to shut up.

They’ve only known each other for a matter of weeks, but already they’re operating on their own frequency, ever so slightly out of tune with everyone else. A different person might have said that almost dying in each other’s arms would do that to people, but Jyn’s nearly died with hundreds of people before and never once developed a two person language. It’s a phenomenon she’s seen everywhere since entering the rebellion. Entire groups of people having entire conversations without speaking a single word, the stench of death and loss swirling around them like a graveyard mist. Bodhi and Chirrut and Baze had also been with them on Scarif, of course, but there was something different between her and Cassian. 

“Looks like someone is coming to talk,” Baze says, nodding to a point behind Jyn and Bodhi. Bodhi, who looks like he has just watched lightning strike in front of him, snaps forward quickly, focusing intently on his meal tray. Jyn once again turns to face the incoming stranger. 

It’s the golden boy — Skywalker. Still so new his Tatooine tan has hardly faded, his blonde hair practically still flecked with sand. He slides into the empty space on the bench beside Bodhi, not with so much of the arrogance that she’d been bracing herself for but rather a softer sort of confidence. 

“Bodhi, right?” He asks. Bodhi looks like he’s just discovered he’s left the house stark naked.

“Uh, yes. Yeah. Yes. That’s me.” Skywalker smiles kindly. 

“The guys are having a party tonight in the Red Squadron rec room—“ Cassian sarcastically mouths “the guys,” but Skywalker doesn’t notice— “and since you’ll be joining us soon, we wanted to see if you’d come along?” Clearly realising his faux pas, Skywalker adjusts his body language, opening himself to everyone else, “And the rest of you, too. Rogue One are always welcome with us.” Jyn gives him a polite, if tight smile. Cassian has become intensely interested in the ice floating in his glass of water. 

“I’ll — we’ll be there,” Bodhi says, stumbling over his own words. Skywalker’s smile widens into a grin, and he nods, trotting back off to his pilot pals at the opposite end of the mess. 

“We’ll be there?” Cassian spits out, seething. “We’ll be there?” Bodhi has the sense to look slightly ashamed of himself. 

“Go. Enjoy it while you’re young.” Chirrut counsels. Cassian looks furious. 

“Free booze is free booze,” Jyn says with a shrug, swinging off the bench and picking up her tray. “And you,” she gestures at Cassian, “could use some booze.”

•º

At 1900 hours she finds herself outside the bunks temporarily assigned to Cassian and Bodhi. Once they’re fully integrated into the rebellion’s hierarchy they’ll be split up and reassigned, but in the excitement of the destruction of the Death Star and the rebellion’s rapid relocation thereafter, their living quarters had fallen down the priority list. 

She can hear Bodhi and Cassian bickering inside, and silently thanks the stars that she’s been assigned solo quarters. She raps on the door, and it opens so quickly it startles her. 

She jerks her head as if to say “let’s go.” Bodhi practically spills out of the room, all frayed nerves and frenetic excitement. 

“You look nice,” she says to him. And he does, she has no idea where he managed to pick up civilian clothes but he ought to thank whoever gave them to him. He looks cool and casual, like he belongs on a Core World metropole and not a frozen hellhole a million light years from civilisation. 

“Thanks,” he mutters, clearly caught off guard by the compliment. “Cassian —“ he starts, gesturing into the room where Cassian stands, grumpiness radiating off him in waves. 

“C’mon,” she says to him. “We’ll have some drinks and reevaluate in an hour. It won’t kill you.” 

•º

It may as well have killed him, for the amount of upset he’s letting build up in him. He and Jyn are perched awkwardly at the perimeter of the room, watching the party unfolding before them like anthropologists observing an alien race. They’ve been sitting in relative silence for the better part of an hour, Cassian simmering in his boredom and Jyn watching Bodhi in bemused silence. 

At the hour mark, a dark haired pilot approaches them, obviously trying to suss out the situation before he makes an interception. “So… Rogue One,” he says, clearly deciding Jyn is his better shot. She just stares at him, waiting for him to give her a better opening line. “I escorted the transport that, uh, picked you guys up.” He says, trying again.

“Oh.” She says lamely. 

“I think it was really remarkable what you guys did, going against the Alliance council like that. That kind of boneheaded bravery has been really lacking around here lately.”

“Boneheaded?” She asks, hoping to catch him in an awkward situation that’ll send him scurrying away.

“Yeah. If I were your commander I’d have grounded you for weeks for that stunt, if not longer, to be honest. If it hadn’t have worked you could’ve destroyed the entire Rebel Alliance, put god knows how many systems at risk of brutal retribution and gotten millions, if not billions killed,” he runs a hand through his long, shaggy hair and exhales, “But it worked. Against all odds. Which is what matters, really.” 

Now she’s the one caught off guard. In the days since her discharge from the medbay she’s been overwhelmed by effluent praise. So much that she’s barely been able to speak to anyone without immediately being thrown into an out of body experience, as if she’s accidentally woken up in the wrong person’s body, and is consequently receiving someone else’s praise.

“Red two, right?” She asks, her voice edging on hoarseness. She tries to remember what she’d overheard between episodes of unconsciousness on the ride back from Scarif. 

“Yeah, but you can call me Wedge,” he says, sticking out a hand to her. She shakes it. 

“Jyn.” 

“I know,” he says, smiling and looking away from her towards the activity of the party. Beside her, Cassian stalks off in the direction of the drinks table.

“He okay?” Wedge asks, nodding towards Cassian’s fleeing form. Jyn nods.

“Just grumpy,” she says, watching Cassian fill his cup with equal parts Corellian spiced rum and Ipellrilla firewater. She winces on his behalf at the hangover that looms in his future. “I made him come out here and he’s going to be in a world of pain tomorrow,” she says, not fully an admission of guilt.

“I sympathise,” Wedge says with a sigh, “This is Red Squadron's rec room, I used to fly with everybody in it. Now it's just me and Luke.” Jyn looks at him, sees the heaviness in his shoulders. She knows the causalities from the Death Star had been concentrated in one squadron, but she'd been knocked out by a morphine drip when it happened and had never learned which it had been. Now she knows. Only two survivors. She shudders. 

  
  


He stays in their mopers’ corner. He shirks the flyboy mantle easily, proving himself a far more reserved and manageable companion than Jyn had expected. He’s an ex-Imp, defected from the pilot’s academy just two years ago. Eventually, Cassian slinks back over, regarding Wedge with wary eyes. But as the night wanes on and with it Jyn’s will to be standoffish towards any member of the cocksure pilot coterie, she has to admit to herself that she doesn’t mind the kid. And he’s not really a kid, with what he’s told her about himself she figures they were probably born within months of each other, but he doesn’t feel nearly as beatdown and war weary as she does. He has plenty of interesting stories to tell, stories that should by all measures render him a hardened veteran, but the crinkles at the corners of his eyes and his easy laugh take years off of him.

She wonders if in a different life she could be like him, standing here feeling not twenty-one years old but twenty-one years young. 

They part with an open, unspoken invitation to friendship, Jyn playfully socking him in the arm before she turns to go. It’s the only sign of affection she knows: before they dumped her it’s how the guys on Saw’s crew signalled their in-group status to one another. Punching someone in the arm and not ending up vaporised had been a powerful symbol of intimacy in her childhood. 

And as she turns away from him, she faces another familiar form of intimacy dredged up from her less-than-ideal childhood: dragging home comrades when they’re piss drunk. 

Cassian has been sat against the wall for a while now, he’d given up on interjecting into her and Wedge’s conversations quickly and sent himself into a self-imposed exile. She hoists him up, grabbing him by the bicep to give her better leverage. He comes up easier than she’d expected, bumping their noses together as he fights himself. He laughs despite himself, and she steers him towards the door. 

Out in the hallway, Cassian comes back to life again with peals of laughter that hit the icy walls and dissipate. She looks at him, confused, but his laughter continues. Ahead, where the hallway diverges into two splinters, two uniformed officers walk by, glancing down the hallway at her and Cassian. They stare just long enough that Jyn realises they’ve recognised them. The rumour mill spun furiously after their recovery from Scarif, propelling them from meagre foot soldiers of the rebellion to something mythic. If it hadn’t been for the destruction of the Death Star and the entrance of Luke Skywalker and Han Solo into the rebellion’s pantheon, she’s sure the weight of it all would’ve crushed her. 

The two officers scurry away and Cassian laughs harder, stumbling slightly and bouncing off the wall. 

“What’s going on?” She asks as he bounces for the second time.

“They’re all like me when I was a kid,” he says, laying his hand flat against his abdomen. She’s not sure if it’s to steady his breathe or to put pressure on a latent injury.

“You? Like them?” She asks. 

“Well not much like them, but young.”

“You were young once?” Cassian attempts to give her the stink eye but can only hold it for so long before he crumbles into laughter again. For this, Jyn allows herself a small smile. It’s nice to see Cassian laughing, not the laughter from the medbay where he’d been doped out of his mind on painkillers and laughter had been the only response his body could muster against the roiling pain, actual laughter. 

Something in her chest pangs and she instinctively reaches up to it, her instincts quicker than her thoughts in her inebriated state. She tries to mask it by reaching out for Cassian’s wrist, pulling him up from the wall. He slides into her, throwing an arm around her shoulders and again her chest aches. The last time they’d held each other like this had been Scarif, clutching each other as they faced certain death. She winces involuntarily, shaking her head slightly to clear her mind of the thoughts, to force away the tingling she feels in her body at every point his body makes contact with hers. 

She turns her head to look at him and he gazes ahead, dazed. She wonders if they’ll ever talk about those moments that they thought would be their last: holding each other as though the other would fall apart if one let go, Cassian whispering words in her ear that she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to repeat lest it breaks her. All the things he had said to her, the words of love spilling from his lips like water from a breached dam, the pain in his voice as he spoke his regrets into the galaxy, praying that the white light about to engulf him would purify his soul. 

He had told her he didn’t think he had a soul, not until he faced his own death head on. Looking at him now, the creases around his eyes and mouth and the light ringing of his laughter, she wonders how he could have ever thought so lowly of himself. 

“Alright Cassian, this is you,” she says, pushing him gently against the ice wall outside his and Bodhi’s quarters. “Drink some water before you go down,” she says, and Cassian’s eyes widen before he explodes with laughter again. “You know what I meant,” she said, pushing his hand off her arm, biting back her own laughter. He drags himself inside the room with more effort than is probably strictly necessary. 

As the door slides shut Jyn feels a part of herself mourn the loss of companionship.

•º

In the morning, she’s roused by a loud beeping over the tannoy in the corner of her room. She flies out of bed, landing on her hands and knees on the floor, throwing herself up into a marksman’s position, hands tearing to her hip holster in search of her blaster. It’s only when she realises that it’s not there that her brain catches up with her body and registers that there’s no danger around her. 

Her heart beating in her head, she takes a deep, shuddering breath as the dizziness washes over her.

She tries to calm herself, slowly identifying objects in the room to ground herself. Ever since Scarif loud noises have shot through her spine like lightning. She will never get the sound of the planet crumbling beneath her out of her head, the great, deep cracking of landmass, the wailing sound of bending metal. The loss of balance as the ground literally fell out from beneath her...

She rubs her eyes with her hands, willing herself to steadiness on her feet, and opens the door. A silver protocol droid stands before her, metallic hand poised to ring her alert bell again. 

“What do you want?” She demands, her voice still hoarse with sleep. 

“Jyn Erso, you are requested in the intelligence briefing room at 0800.” The droid turns and leaves, giving her no time to protest or ask questions. 

She checks the chrono on the wall above her bed. 0745. Nice. 

•º

At 0755 she is seated in a chair surrounding the large, circular briefing table in the intelligence briefing room. Also present are General Draven, two case officers who she vaguely recognises from Yavin, and a tall, older man dressed in naval uniform. She occupies herself with watching the seconds tick by on the projected chrono, trying to focus her breathing, feeling her feet flat on the steady ground.

  
  


At 0758 the door to the briefing room slides open, and a surprisingly composed Cassian strides in. He gives Draven a diplomatic nod before sitting next to Jyn, smoothing down the creases in his pants. 

“How’s your head?” She leans over to ask, voice barely above a whisper. He just stares blankly ahead and she smirks. 

  
  


At 0759 she is dragged up to a standing position by Cassian as Draven steps towards the briefing table. 

“Good morning all,” he says, beginning to speak precisely as the chrono flips to 0800. Jyn wonders if everything the rebels do is done with such attention to detail. “We have received word that a new rebel cell has emerged on Kijimi,” he begins. 

“Kijimi? That can’t be, it’s been held by spice smugglers for centuries, there’s nothing there but gang warfare and Imp spooks,” she blurts. Cassian elbows her. Draven eyes her.

“We believe the cell is comprised of non-gang civilians and core world refugees. Your mission is to make contact with the cell, establish a hierarchy, and integrate them to our decentralised cell structures. Commander Krannurak will provide you with your briefing reports,” he gestures towards one of the case officers she recognises from Yavin, an Iktotchi male with light peach skin. 

“Captain Andor, you will note this is a smaller brief than your typical missions. If I had it my way you would continue to be grounded, but the Princess Leia requested you specifically for this mission,” Draven says, sighing as if he’s still hoping the order will be recalled. “You will therefore use this mission to train Lieutenant Erso in our standard operating procedure.” 

She bristles at hearing a military rank precede her name, a level of formality attached to her identity she never planned for herself.

“The lieutenant is correct that Kijimi is overrun by gang warfare, to that end, you will need a naval escort to and from the planet. Commander Narra will connect you with your naval escorts. Any questions?” Both she and Cassian stay silent, Cassian tense beside her. “Excellent. You leave at 1200.” He exists the room with no further engagement.

Jyn suspects he might be part droid. 

“Commander Krannurak, if you don’t mind, I’d like to brief first, I’ve got a training exercise to run.” The Iktotchi nods. Narra leans against the briefing table. “It’s simple from my end, really. I’m leaving you in the hands of my two best pilots, Lieutenants Antilles and Skywalker—“ 

“Your only two pilots,” Cassian mutters. 

“—who will meet you in hangar bay seven. You’ll be using a stolen and modified AEG-77 Vigo transporter, using conventional routes, which will slow down your journey substantially compared to what you’re used to, but provide increased protection and cover. I think that’s my part. Anything you want answered?” 

“No sir, thank you, sir.” Cassian says with military precision. 

“Oh, off the record, I’m a big fan of your work,” Narra says with a glint in his eyes as he looks between Cassian and Jyn. Cassian nods politely.

Jyn fumbles with her hands, exhaling uncomfortably once Narra has excused himself from the room. 

“Now for the hard part,” says Krannurak, stepping forward. Jyn braces herself. 

•º

The brief is simpler than she thought. They’re posing as Correllian refugees looking for protection under the Black Sun, the currently dominant gang in Kijimi. They’ll sniff out the cell, make contact, and get the hell out as soon as they can. 

“Do they usually use the navy for intelligence missions?” Jyn asks Cassian as they make their way to the hangar. 

“Not typically, no. The Princess has always been a bit wary of the intelligence force and has tried to keep us at an arm’s length.”

“Not hard to see why,” Jyn says casually. Cassian’s face shows no emotion.

“I guess since Scarif her opinion has changed.” They approach their shuttle, where the pilot from last night, Wedge, and Luke Skywalker hurry about completing pre-flight checks. Cassian’s eyes roll so hard she fears he might give himself a headache.

“Or you’ve become too hard to ignore.”

“We’ve become too hard to ignore. You’re one of us now.” Jyn blanches. It hits like a sack of bricks to the gut. 

•º

Once they’re comfortably in hyperspace, they regroup in the small main hold in the centre of the ship. Cassian provides a summary of the mission brief, though it’s clear both Wedge and Skywalker have heard it. 

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” Jyn says when he’s done. Cassian looks at her askance. 

“I’ve been to Kijimi once before several years ago. It’s a wasteland, the people who live there are either in one gang or the other, or they’re smart enough to keep their heads down. The place is crawling with spooks, Imp, gang, or otherwise. Even if someone could get a rebel cell started there they’d be crushed by the gangs before they even posed the vaguest of threats to the Empire. The only thing we’re going to find there is spice and maybe a particularly reckless Imperial spy trying to smoke us out.” 

Nobody around the table speaks.

“Plus, I can’t play a refugee. I sound like I’ve walked straight out of the high halls of the Empire, it’s why Saw always made me stay silent on missions.” 

“Saw Guerrera?” Skywalker asks as though he’s just missed everything else she’s said. 

“Yes.” Skywalker says no more.

“You could be CorSec,” Wedge offers weakly.

“A cop refugee?” Jyn asks, quirking her eyebrow, “If I survived Scarif only to get merked by a common drug runner on some wasteland backwater I’m going to be pissed.” 

•º

The mission is, as she had predicted, an utter disaster. Skywalker had been complaining that something felt off from the minute they dropped out of the hyperspace lane by Wobani, and despite her insistence that they listen to the golden boy magician, Cassian and Wedge had voted to press on. 

After they’d reached orbit above Kijimi, it had all been too easy. Landing credentials accepted by the Black Sun screws with no follow-up questions, a cheap and protected landing pad made available within minutes, and a promise of Black Sun protection while on the planet. It was setting off every single one of Jyn’s alarm bells, and Skywalker had looked positively bloodless when Cassian had pulled rank to get them to continue with the mission.

So, they landed. 

In retrospect, she shouldn’t have leaned into the absurdity of the situation, ignoring every single one of her instincts to be the first out of the ship before Skywalker’s astromech had even finished a preliminary scan of the area. She should have worn the base armour that had been issued specifically for this mission. She should have armed her blaster before she began her descent down the ramp. 

She shouldn’t have been surprised when she felt the blaster bolt hit her, pain materialising into a bright white light, strangling her vision. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Outer Rim](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Outer_Rim_Territories)
> 
> [Red Squadron](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Red_Squadron_\(Rebel_Alliance\)/Legends)
> 
> [Core Worlds](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Core_Worlds)
> 
> I recognise that Wedge was actually on the ground at Yavin coordinating the redirection of the fleet during the Scarif attack but that's boring so I've retconned it.
> 
> [Corellian rum](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Corellian_rum/Legends)
> 
> [Ipellrilla firewater](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ipellrilla_firewater)
> 
> [Kijimi](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Kijimi)
> 
> [Iktotchi](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Iktotchi)
> 
> [Commander Narra](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Arhul_Narra)
> 
> [ AEG-77 Vigo ](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/AEG-77_Vigo)
> 
> [Black Sun](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Sun/Legends)
> 
> [CorSec](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Corellian_Security_Force) I don't think CorSec typically have An Accent per se but Marc Thompson gives Corran Horn a hog wild received pronunciation accent in the Legends audiobooks so I've decided it's canon now.
> 
> [Wobani](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Wobani)


	2. Chapter 2

The air evacuates her lungs with a loud gasp as she flies backwards, landing with a heavy thud (and a fair few subsequent cracks) on the hard metal of the landing ramp. “Fuck,” she yells as a second blaster bolt hits the ramp just inches from her head. “Up! Up! Get the ramp up!” She bellows, flipping herself onto her stomach and using her one still-functioning arm to drag herself up the ramp. The response comes just a second too late; as the ramp shudders and began its retraction another blaster bolt reams into the back of her thigh with such force that she slams her head down again with another unsettling crack. 

“You motherfuckers!” She yells repeatedly after the ramp closes, but nobody listens to her as they scramble to secure the ship and get clear of the fire. 

The last thing she remembers is gargling blood as she makes a meagre gesture at hurling more abuse at whoever makes the mistake of approaching her first. 

•º

She wakes hours later to a blistering headache and her arm and leg hung precariously from the bunk above her. 

“You okay?” Someone asks from beside her. 

“Shut up,” she responds through gritted teeth. 

“Do you need more painkillers?”

“Shut the fuck up.” A Corellian leather belt flops onto her chest and she looks at it like it’s just spat in her face. “What am I supposed to do with this?” She asks indignantly. 

“Bite it. I’ve got stuff to do and if you’re going to make more trouble for me I want this done quickly,” Wedge’s response comes. So she does, reckoning that if she wasn’t in such blinding pain she might have reached over and smacked him.

He pulls her leg down from the jury-rigged sling and she fears she’s going to grind her teeth to dust. Her trousers have been cut at the top of her thigh, and despite the agony she mourns the loss of her last good pair of pants. Wedge applies a bacta patch to the gnarly scorch mark along her hamstring before binding it with gauze from the medpac. Every muscle in her leg burns from the inside out and biting down on the belt only stops her screams, tears flow down her face in red hot streaks. 

He ties the gauze off unceremoniously at the top of her thigh, bending her knee, and placing her foot down on the floor beside the cot. He reaches to her mouth, grabbing the belt. She takes a moment longer to bite the belt to make sure she’s done screaming, then releases it. 

“And my arm?” She asks, momentarily regaining her composure. 

“It’s fine,” he says, untying the sling and gingerly pulling it down, using both hands to bring it to her side. “Covered it in bacta while you slept. It must’ve just barely hit you because it healed real quick.” She tests the joint, bending and unbending her arm with insecure slowness. It appears to work fine, more inflexible than painful. 

“Go easy on your boyfriend, he’s been practically eating himself alive while you’ve been out.”

“My — my what?” She asks, wondering if she’s hallucinating from the pain. 

“Your — oh. _Oh._ Right, sorry, read that one totally wrong,” he scratches the nape of his neck, a subtle pinkness covering the tops of his cheeks and nose.

“Not everybody’s shagging their pals,” she says bitterly. Perhaps a bit too bitterly. The blush on Wedge’s face recedes and is replaced by a smug grin. 

“You really haven’t been here long, have you?” She blinks at him. “Right,” he says, patting her arm, “sleep if you feel like you need to and then we’ll regroup in the main hold when you’re up to it.” 

He leaves her, and she gingerly moves her arm to a more comfortable position. Out in the hallway she hears voices. 

“Still asleep, Captain.”

“I heard you speaking?” Cassian says. 

“To myself, I haven’t had to deal with blaster burns in a while and was coaching myself through it.” She can hear Cassian hum. Once both men retreat from the dormitory, she lets the grumpiness seep back over her. 

Every single part of this mission brief had gone against all her instincts; everything she had learned out on her own or been taught by Saw told her it had been unnervingly easy, and that that should have been the first sign of trouble. She could try and blame it on her hangover but the truth was the hangover had very little to do with it. Maybe she was slightly grumpier, but if anything that should have made her argue her corner more fiercely, not less. No, the truth of the matter is that Jyn Erso has been feeling very little like Jyn Erso lately and a lot like someone else, though she’s not sure exactly who. 

She looks down at her one good arm. Intermingled with the healing burns on her skin are faint pink lightning marks, running along each nerve point. It’s something she hadn’t noticed on Jedha, they’d been running too quickly to stop and pay attention to the effects of the blast. But on Scarif she had been collapsed on her knees and had learned the hard way that the charged electron particles rained down by the Death Star blast electrified the sand, biting and burning at her skin, sending waves of electricity up her spine and across her body. The burns she had expected, the electrocution she had not. 

She twists her arm, tracing the lightning bolts with her eyes. They’d said in the medbay on Yavin that the scars would fade to white over time. For now they’re a vibrant reminder that she’s living on borrowed time. Cassian has them, too. She’d seen the full extent of his for the first time the night he’d been discharged from the medbay, when he’d crawled into her bunk on Yavin, trembling despite the heat. The lines extended from his wrists to the centre of his chest, where his heart pounded heavily against his breastbone. She’d traced the lines with her finger, then pressed kisses where her finger had been. He’d whimpered when she’d placed a gentle kiss to the skin above his heart, and she’d tugged her fatigues off to show him her matching scars. Yet another way they’d become inextricably linked. 

At some point, she drifts off to sleep. When she comes to, it’s because she’s lying uncomfortably on her hurt arm, shocks of pain chasing from her bicep to the back of her neck. 

She makes her way into the main hold, dragging her bum leg awkwardly behind her. She stops abruptly at the entrance to the hold, shocked. Before her, Skywalker is wielding his lightsaber, sapphire reflecting off his hair, skin, and almost everything around him. Her breath catches. She’s never seen a lightsaber before, but had grown up hearing stories about the Jedi and their awesome blades of light. 

“Sorry!” Skywalker says, spinning around to face her. He has the humility to look bashful and a wave of affection washes over Jyn; he really is just a kid. She waves him off and he disengages his lightsaber. She watches the blade disappear and momentarily mourns its loss. 

She sits down on a bench, propping her leg up as she does. She imagines how pathetic she must look and scowls. Ahead of her, Cassian has appeared, leaning against the doorframe broodily. “Where are we?” She asks.

“In orbit above Wobani.”

“Decided you’re done with me that quickly?” She smirks. 

“You’re from here? I thought it was an Imperial prison planet?” Luke asks, sitting down on the bench opposite her. 

“It’s not a prison planet, it’s a planet that has prison camps. But yes, this is where the Alliance picked me up.” Just a month ago she realises. She winces. 

“What’d you get locked up for?” Luke asks, with an eagerness that almost mistakes her into thinking that she’s the interesting one and not him, the last Jedi. 

“It’s probably easier to ask what she wasn’t locked up for.” Cassian says, and she looks up to him, a twinkle in her eye.

“Where’s Wedge?” She adjusts her leg, sending a spasm up her lower back. 

“I’m here,” a voice says from behind her, and Wedge settles onto the bench next to her. “How’s the leg?” She shakes her head. Cassian eyes her, and she looks up at him, confused. 

“We’re going to try again,” Cassian announces. 

“What? Why?” Jyn is blindsided. Here she is, hobbling around like an asshole because of their carelessness and already they’ve decided to go in for seconds. 

“None of us are comfortable potentially leaving a rebel cell out to dry. If nothing else, this can serve as a useful recon mission to fill out the Alliance’s file on the planet.” Cassian says. She narrows her eyes at him. 

“And when did you decide this?” She spits back. 

”You’ve been out for quite a while,” Skywalker tells her, a concessionary look on his face. 

“What? How long?” She asks, turning to look for a chrono but finding her movement restricted by the shooting pain in her leg. 

“About eight hours.” A cold wave rushes over her. Eight hours? That’s a long time. Longer than it should’ve been.

“I’m not going back out there.” She says angrily. 

“No, obviously not,” Cassian says, finally sitting down on the bench next to Skywalker. “You’ll stay here and keep the ship ready to go. We’ll use a two man recon team, dropping off away from the landing pads, and then you’ll take the ship back into orbit here to await our call. It shouldn’t take more than a couple days, and then we’ll go.” Jyn is throughly unhappy with this; the risk far outweighs the potential gain and she is more than done with suicide missions.

“And you’ve already decided this, so I’ve been outvoted.” A beat. Nobody says anything. 

“Yes, Jyn.” 

She sighs angrily. 

“Fine, on your heads be it.” She says, standing up with as much anger as she can show. (It’s not much.) She tries very hard to stomp off, but to little effect as her leg drags sadly behind her. The pathetic state of her dramatic exit infuriates her even more, and she slams the door of the dormitory shut with the last physical strength she can muster. 

•º

Almost an hour later, Cassian enters the dormitory, softly sliding the door closed behind him. 

“Jyn—“

“—I’m not angry. It’s your life, if you want to do stupid things with it you’re more than welcome. I just wish you’d even pretend to consider my thoughts on this.” He kneels in front of her, taking her hands and holding them together between his. 

“Jyn, I have of course considered you. But I have my own reasons, too. Remember how alone we felt on our way to Scarif? Like we were on our way to our deaths and the galaxy wouldn’t care one way or another? I can’t condemn anyone else to that.”

“But we don’t even know if there’s anyone down there!”

“Nobody knew if we were alive on Scarif, but they took the risk and now we’re here. If I’m going to continue living on borrowed time I’m going to put that time to work.”

She wants to grab his face, bring it to hers. She wants to cry and beg him not to go, to stay with her, to hold her and to be with her and to stop risking it all. To just breathe together and accept that for a moment, just this moment, they are enough. 

But she doesn’t. She steels herself, straightening her spine just so, pulling her hands out from between his. 

“Go.” She says, waving her hands in front of her, as if whirling away smoke from a snuffed-out candle. “Go.” She says again, this time to herself. He kneels in front of her for a moment longer before standing, brushing the dust off his pants and straightening out the cuffs of his jacket.

She follows him through to the cockpit where Wedge and Skywalker are seated. Wedge has primary control of the ship, and Skywalker’s sitting with his feet up on the dashboard. They stop talking when she and Cassian enter.

“We’re entering orbit above the Southern Hemisphere of Kijimi, Captain. I’m going to take her down to about 100 meters above the surface and then you and Luke can drop out the back with the speeders. We’ll wait for your all clear then head back to Wobani to await your call.”

•º

Wedge doesn’t get to watch Luke and Andor drop out from behind the ship. Instead, he watches their signatures drop lower and lower until they level out. He lets out a breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding, then looks back out the viewport, watching the mountains of Kijimi melt away, until they’re in the black, hurtling back towards Wobani. 

He had had his fair share of misgivings about the mission, the intelligence he’d been privy to had seemed weak at best, and he didn’t see why the last two remaining members of Red Squadron had to be taken away from Hoth while their commander tried out the new recruits. And on a personal level, this mission was nauseating him. 

He wanted to chalk it up to his frayed nerves since the Death Star. The whole thing had been a nightmarish cocktail of emotional turmoil for him: the fear at the sheer size of the planet killer, the humiliation and shame at having to pull out of the trench run, the anguish at watching his entire squadron annihilated, then the elation of seeing the Death Star destroyed and baring witness to the rebellion’s first major victory.

Then: Luke. 

Naive Luke. Brave Luke. Hotshot Luke. Beautiful Luke. His heart seizes at the thought. 

He’d known he was in too deep the minute Luke had collapsed into him on Yavin. He had been shaking from adrenaline and fear and tears and Force knows what else. And the tears came so quickly that Wedge had had no idea what to do about it, just held him closer and let him cry. 

He remembered the first deaths he’d suffered in the rebellion, remembered how they’d wrenched him out of his body, made him feel like he’d been floating ten feet above the world, unable to wrest back control. All it took was one look at Luke to know he didn’t want that for him, would let that happen to him. The boy was too pure, too hopeful to go the way of the rebellion’s most cynical stalwarts. 

He shakes himself to drive the feeling away, easing the ship into orbit above Wobani. He pushes away from the controls, switching the autopilot on. He retreats to the main hold, in dire need of distraction. 

“How is it?” He asks Jyn, watching her fuss with her leg. She shrugs, barely looking up at him. She has the same simmering angst emanating off of her that he’s trying to stifle in himself.

He drops down into the chair, a forced show of nonchalance. 

“It never gets easier,” he says, folding his arms over his chest. 

“What doesn’t?” 

“Watching people go off on suicide missions.”

“Have you been on many suicide missions?”

“Not as many as you might think. Less than ten.”

“Less than ten,” she repeats hollowly, and he surveys her. She’s made a show and a half on base of her supposed indifference to the world, but here she is, sitting in front of him brooding like a teenager. 

“He’s the last of your squadron?” He feels the air leave his body, and clears his throat to ground himself.

“Yeah. He was barely in it, too. Baptism by fire, I guess.”

“Must be tough being the last Jedi _and_ the last of your squadron.”

“He’s not the last Jedi.” Wedge tries to muffle the sorrow creeping into the edge of his voice, tries to suppress memories of Ezra Bridger, of Kanan Jarrus. Of General Syndulla’s tears — of the terrible price of falling in love with a Jedi. 

“What? There are more?”

“I’ve known two.”

“Two? Where are they now?” Wedge shrugs, the uneasiness in his stomach settling into a less pronounced anxiety as he forces the sound of Hera’s sobs out of his mind. 

“A lot of people come and go from the Rebellion, I can’t keep track of them all.” She seems to accept this as reasonable, turning back to her wound dressing. 

“It helps if you find something to occupy yourself,” he says, “just keep your mind moving so it doesn’t stew. He’ll be fine.”

“We’re not—“ Wedge puts up his hand to stop her. 

“Yeah, yeah, not sleeping together, you said. I don’t know what’s going on with you guys but trust me, it’s all normal here. Emotions run high, six people go away on a mission, two come back, and everybody wants to feel like they have something — someone — to fight for. This is the closest you’re going to get to true bohemianism in a military environment.” 

“You don’t strike me as a bohemian.” She says. He pushes air out through his nose, a laugh — maybe.

He isn’t a bohemian, not close. Even so many years after his defection from Skystrike he still tends towards Imperial rigidity. His spine is always a little too straight, words a lot too neatly-enunciated, manner a little too uncompromising. He’s not alone in it: there are so many Imperial defectors in the Alliance, many of them greener than he is, but the alienation ingrained into him by the Empire means even where he notices similar affects in others he still can’t conjure a feeling of solidarity. 

There are few people he feels genuine connections with anymore. His squadron had been some, before they’d been blown to stardust. Hobbie is another, Hobbie, who defected with him, Hobbie who had thankfully — miraculously — been on the other side of the galaxy when the Death Star had been destroyed. Who hadn’t watched him pull out of the trench run, who didn’t care about how Wedge felt about the mission, who still saw him as his friend.

His mind drifts to Luke with a softer touch than before. He remembers how Luke had looked the morning after the Battle of Yavin. Wedge had fallen asleep sitting on the floor, back against Luke’s cot. When he had woken up, his arm was numb, his fingers stiff and still interwoven with Luke’s. 

He told himself it’s what he would have wanted after his first major battle. That he was there because he was a friend, with no ulterior motives. But the way the blue light from the chrono on the wall above Luke’s head illuminated his face made his breath stutter. 

As he watched Luke sleep he tried to fight back the emotion that was tearing him up, threatening to burst through his chest. 

He wanted to remember Hera’s red-rimmed eyes, the heartache that had haunted her voice for weeks after Kanan’s death. He couldn’t. All he could feel was hot blooded affection clouding his mental defence systems. 

When Luke woke up that morning, his piercing blue eyes peering out beneath heavy lids and thick eyelashes, it had taken all of Wedge’s remaining strength to not gasp. 

•º

A siren wails. His eyes fly open. 

He’d fallen asleep in the engine room after a day spent tinkering with the hyperdrive. The hydrospanner presses a dull weight against his chest. His neck crunches as he jumps to his feet. The siren continues to wail. 

It’s coming from inside the ship.

He runs to the cockpit where he finds Jyn seated in the primary pilot’s seat. “Something’s wrong,” she volunteers. Wedge pauses a minute, taking in everything that’s happening outside the viewport. 

They’re not in orbit above Wobani. They’re hurtling downwards far too quickly towards a mountainous terrain. “I’ll say! What the hell is going on here?” He demands, bracing himself as the ship rocks. 

“Something’s wrong.” He reaches up, flips down the orbital lock. The alarm goes silent. A rookie mistake on her part, one that means he no longer trusts her to control the ship. 

“You’re going to have to give me more than that!” He slides into the co-pilot’s chair, reaching over to release her from primary control and transfer them to his helm. Carefully, methodically, he nudges the ship into a less severe trajectory. “Did they comm? How did you know something’s wrong?” He presses. 

“I don’t know I just — I just do.” He tears his eyes away to glare at her. He had been prepared for reckless when he heard he’d be serving a mission with a remnant of Rogue One, but stupidity? That he hadn’t expected. 

“You just knew.” He repeats lamely, furthering levelling out the ship. 

He doesn’t have time for continued scepticism; the comm crackles to life as the peaks of the mountains creep ever closer. 

“Red One, Red One call back.” Luke’s voice. Luke's panicked voice. Wedge’s heart drops to his stomach.

“This is Red One, we read you Red Two.” Jyn scrambles for the comm. 

“Red One we are requesting immediate pickup. Transmitting location to you now. Have a medpac ready to go.” 

“Copy that Red One.” Wedge looks at Jyn, whose face has gone as hard as a rock. He nods in the direction of the med bay and she scampers away. 

His heart feels over-large behind his breastbone, thumping like a war drum. The ship’s navicomp receives the transmitted coordinates and he steers towards it. He prepares himself for the worst outcome: a mortal injury, a death. A triggered trap that could end with them all dead. He swallows hard and tries to focus on the shifting topography beneath him, scouting for any sign of Luke and Andor. 

“Red One we have eyes on you, drop down to approximately five meters and lower the landing ramp, we’re on our way to you.”

“Do you copy, Jyn?” 

“Copy. On my way to the ramp now,” her voice rings through his headset, as steely as her face had been. He dutifully follows Luke’s instruction, letting his mind transition entirely into flight mode, letting all other thoughts fall by the wayside. 

Seconds pass like decades while he drops the ship down, a hundred meters, then fifty, then ten. 

“Alright Wedge, get us the hell out of here.”

He slams the ship up with more force than is strictly necessary, careening out of Kijimi’s atmosphere in record time. He calculates the coordinates for the jump to hyperspace then reminds himself to breathe as the stars stretch and twist into lines of pure light. 

Once he’s sure they’re safely in hyperspace, he makes his way to the back of the ship, his stress levels a little higher than he’d hoped. 

He hears the laughter before he makes it halfway back. It’s loud, breathy, and stunted, almost choked off. 

Jyn is leaning casually against the wall inside the landing vestibule, arms crossed over her chest, biting her bottom lip to hold back a smile. She is the very picture of relief. 

In front of her, Luke and Andor are draped across their respective speeders like they’re made of silk. Luke is laughing, then choking off his laughter to catch up on breathing, then devolving into laughter again. Cassian, showing comparatively less emotion, looks pleased. 

But there is now a fifth person on their ship. A fifth person, who laughs too, but less comfortably. He looks to Jyn, who merely shrugs. 

Luke notices his presence and pulls himself off the speeder, choking back more laughter as he closes the space between him and Wedge. He throws an arm around his neck, pulling him in to a tight but awkward hug. Wedge worries Luke will feel his heart pounding through his shirt. 

“Wedge! I’d like you to meet Shira Brie.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Bacta](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bacta)
> 
> [Saw Gerrera](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Saw_Gerrera)
> 
> [Skystrike](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Skystrike_Academy)
> 
> [Hydrospanner](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Hydrospanner)
> 
> [Navicomp](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Navigation_computer/Legends)


	3. Chapter 3

Shira Brie, as it turns out, is not what they’d been looking for, but is exactly what they needed. A former cargo-pilot from Coruscant who had found her career intersected one too many times by the horrors of Imperial slavery, she stands with a relaxed but confident posture, speaks in a lilting Coruscanti dialect, and moves with unburdened shoulders. 

In truth, she fits effortlessly in to the cycle of life with the Rebellion. Narra appoints Luke to train her up to Red Squadron standards, and Wedge is assigned to spotting recruits from other squadrons or sections of the Alliance, and it’s not long before they’ve more or less pulled together a full squadron again. 

It feels hollow to Wedge, Red Squadron is still inhabited by ghosts. He pulls back from socialising, only learning as much about his new squad mates as he needs to get the job done, and not enough to wake up hoarse from night terrors when they inevitably die. 

He overloads his days so he doesn’t notice the outline of Theron in the briefing room, or Biggs in the mess. He volunteers for every mission he can, substituting the survivor’s guilt that racks his body when he’s grounded for the artificial high possible only when he’s burning sky. 

The day he and Jyn start their torture training, General Syndulla arrives from Lothal, her months-old son in tow. Jacen Syndulla is a delight: he’s already got a mop of green hair and a deliriously goofy smile that makes his strong nose crinkle. Wedge takes one look at the boy, sees the unmistakable resemblance to his father, and vomits. 

Jyn leans against the ‘fresher doorframe, silently watching him as he washes and rewashes his face with nearly-freezing water. The people who have picked up on his feelings for Luke — and admittedly there are more of those than he’d have liked — radiate pity when they’re around him. Jyn does not. 

She says she has no time for pity, for herself or anyone else, but Wedge sees how she looks at Cassian. He knows that she doesn’t pity him because inside she, too, is falling apart. 

•º

Cassian tries not to watch her from across the room, tries to give Bodhi his full attention as Bodhi excitedly recounts his first mission with the Red Squadron. They’d only been escorting a resource shipment through the blockade on Ibaar, a fairly routine deployment for the x-wings, but Bodhi’s excitement is palpable. He stumbles over his words even more than usual, gesticulating wildly as he recounts the blockade run. Behind them, Baze and Chirrut are recounting tales from Jedha to an enraptured Luke Skywalker, whose eyes shine so brightly they could almost be mistaken for stars. 

Jyn, meanwhile, looks anything but excited. For the last twenty minutes she has been more or less cornered by one of the y-wing pilots. It had taken Cassian some time to rack his brain and figure out who the man is, but he’s fairly certain he’s in Gold Squadron. Like most of the other pilots, he cuts a lithe shape, shorter than the average foot-soldier. His apparent control of the entire situation seems to come from his body language. 

And if there’s one thing Cassian knows, it’s how to read body language. 

The pilot has been inching subtly closer to Jyn, his hips tilted ever so slightly forward, feet pointed in her direction. He’s leaning against the wall beside them, his elbow the main point of contact, just a few inches above Jyn’s eye line. It’s a clever strategy, it makes him appear taller while also allowing him to take up more space, physically dominating the conversation. 

Jyn, for her part, does not shrink back. Her physique is much smaller than his, but she makes up for what she lacks in build with a brutally austere posture. She’s turned almost a full ninety degrees away from him. Her eyes never make contact with his, instead roaming aimlessly around the room. Her arms are crossed high over her chest, one foot planted against the wall behind her. 

Cassian smirks. This flyboy fool is missing every flag she’s raising. He’s desperate to go over there — not because he doesn’t trust Jyn to handle herself, he knows better than that, but because he’s longing to immerse himself in the experience of this man humiliating himself so obviously. 

“You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t believe how fast those things move,” Bodhi says, fire in his eyes. “I mean the Ties are smoother, yes, their suspension is basically unbeatable, but our turning radius and acceleration power is just awesome. I mean the minute you deploy from your capital ships you’re outta there like that,” he slides one hand across the other to demonstrate, his own eyes following his hand as though he’s actually watching an x-wing darting across the thicket of battle. 

“I mean the Tie’s cockpit is much more spacious and I always thought an x-wing cockpit would be too cramped but it’s so much more manageable than I thought,” his voice curls up as a question. Cassian’s attention drops back to Jyn just in time to catch a real show. 

The rocketjock has leaned in, fluttering his eyelashes on his descent. Jyn has raised her hand to cup his face between her forefinger and thumb like a grandmother coddling a child’s face. For a moment, Cassian worries he’s the one who has misread the situation and mentally readies himself to look away from Jyn kissing that two-bit hotshot. But his eyes linger. 

Her fist makes contact with his cheekbone with a devastating crack. 

The room falls silent, heads turning every which way to discover the source of the noise. The pilot looks shocked, like his face has been frozen in time. 

The last straggling heads have swivelled his direction. 

He slowly reaches his hand out to the front of his mouth. He spits into it. 

Even from this distance Cassian can see the blood in his saliva, maybe a tooth, too.

Even a vibroblade would struggle to cut through the tension in the room. He forces air back into his lungs, reminding himself that breathing is a bodily function even he can’t shirk. 

The silence continues. 

Then, a great big thundering of laughter pierces the air. The pilot. 

The tension drains from the room. 

“Alright Jyn Erso, you’ve made your point,” he booms, clapping her on the back. The party roars back to life, and Cassian thinks only he notices how Jyn’s whole body stiffens when the pilot’s hand slaps her shoulder blade. 

She looks him dead in the eye and his heart stops. She nods towards the door and takes her leave. He looks back to Bodhi, who is smirking knowingly at him. “Go,” he says, shooing him away. 

Before he leaves the room, he looks back at Bodhi, who has melted back into the circle of pilots huddled around Shira, who is animatedly holding court in the middle of the rec room. Bodhi looks like a natural there among them, like this is where he was always destined to be. 

Cassian steps outside and is immediately pinned against the ice wall. Jyn pulls his head down towards her, fisting one hand into his hair, the other laying flat against his cheek. She kisses him hard and sloppily, pressing him into the wall with more strength than it seems should be available to her tiny frame. 

It’s horrible, this routine they’ve fallen into in the weeks since Kijimi. Whatever emotional headway he’d made with Jyn since Scarif collapsed the moment they arrived back at Echo Base. She no longer seeks him out at night when she’s kept awake by nightmares and flashbacks, instead, he finds out at breakfast when she looks past the world with dark, sunken eyes. 

The only times she comes to him now are when she’s had a drink or when she’s restless, and it’s always like this, a flurry of lips and teeth and skin-on-skin, over as fast as it starts. She’s always the one to walk away from him, and he can’t do anything but watch her as she goes, breath ragged and head spinning. 

She pulls back, her breath hot against his lips, and he’s already mourning her imminent departure. But she doesn’t leave, just grabs his shirt and hauls him closer to her, their bodies touching from hip to forehead. She kisses him again, and it’s like the air shifts around them, like a wave breaking over a rock. This time, she’s slow and methodical, like if she’s gentle enough she’ll be able to slow down time. 

Cassian’s heart aches. He wants to wrap her up and carry her to bed, to kiss her scars and tell her how much he loves her; to tell her not like he did on the beach at Scarif, a final, desperate plea for grace from a cruel and unfeeling world, but as slowly as she’s kissing him now, to finally make theirs the time that they are stealing. 

As if to underscore how little power they had over their own time, someone comes barrelling out of the door next to them, yelling. Jyn startles. She pulls her hand back from his chest and his hand briefly chases it before he calls his body back into discipline. 

Jyn turns on her heel and disappears around the corner before the feeling of her has even dissipated from Cassian’s lips. The drunken Bith who had interrupted them barely notices Cassian’s presence, instead yelling back through the open door at partygoers just inside the threshold. 

Cassian, sufficiently flustered, pushes brusquely past them and makes a beeline for the drinks table. He barely has his hand around the neck of a bottle of Vaschean rye when he hears his name called. 

“Come here, Cassian!” Shira practically sings from her seat in the centre of the room. He is acutely aware that many pairs of eyes have fallen on him, and he squares out his posture before turning the face them. 

“I was just telling everybody how you so bravely rescued me,” she says when he draws near.

“I wouldn’t call that a rescue,” he says, and she playfully smacks the side of his legs before launching into the story. 

It truly hadn’t been what Cassian would have called a rescue operation at all, rather a true blue extraction operation. Within hours of touching down on Kijimi, Skywalker had started feeling the pull of something out of order. He’d described it as an energy that felt misplaced. While Cassian typically didn’t go in for that sort of magical thinking, he’d been unable to conjure any leads from conventional methods and so followed the Jedi. 

In total, it’d taken about twelve hours — non-inclusive of four hours for sleep — to find Shira. They caught up with her while she was setting charges to blow up a Black Sun cantina, and once they’d breeched a basic threshold of trust, had helped her set the fuses and run. (That particular stunt had not made it into the debriefing report). A quick shootout, a short speeder chase, and then they’d been scooped up by Jyn and Antilles, barrelling out of the sector with minimal obstacles. So, not exactly a rescue mission. 

Still, Shira looks over to him and smiles throughout her (far more exciting) retelling of the story, and in his foul mood even he has to admit he’s happy to be on the receiving end of some positivity. The way she tells it, too, is almost unrecognisable to him, in her recital he looks like a hero, far nobler and courageous than he would have ever attributed to himself. 

He’s almost entirely lost in this fantasy blanket that Shira’s spinning for him when there’s a soft tap on his shoulder. He looks up to see the intelligence duty officer standing behind him. 

“Caption Andor, if you’ll follow me. It’s quite urgent.”

•º

Jyn’s head is spinning so fast it feels like a hurricane has replaced her brain. She walks until the hallway runs out, then she doubles back and paces a different hallway until that one dies out in the main hangar. 

The hangars are always eerily quiet at night, save for a few mechanic droids puttering about below the ships and one or two base security staff on patrol. There’s a soft whir of the glacial wind forcing its way through the cracks in the structure.

She wanders between the ships, dragging her hand along anything she can, feeling the biting cold of the metal against her fingertips. The x-wings have never been her favourite of the Rebellion’s ships, she finds them too recognisable and ostentatious for her liking. Flying an x-wing is like hitching a target and a “fuck you” to the back of your ship and parading through enemy space. It’s a level of inherent risk she doesn’t like in her life. 

It doesn’t help that all the pilots have taken to painting their ships. Originally, they’d all been marked with the Rebellion’s phoenix symbol, a vibrant but simple and easily-concealed icon. Each ship had born the same symbol, a mark of camaraderie. Now, they’re each noticeably different, various markings making each pilot’s ship uniquely their own. In her life, Jyn has learned that individuality is a death sentence. As she gazes across the x-wings, able to make the tenant of each ship based on its markings, she wonders how many have already been tagged and identified by the Empire. How many of the pilots will be betrayed and lost not by an act of the gods or a fair loss in a fair fight, but by the advantage afforded to their opponents by the identification of a name, or a clan symbol. 

The x-wing directly in front of her is mostly unmarked. There’s the rebel Phoenix, of course, and a medallion encompassing two twin, orange suns. She reaches up to feel the uneven paint of the suns, to trace where the paint falls out of line, placed by an unsteady hand. 

One day this person will die, too, she thinks. 

Her hand falls to the khyber crystal that weighs heavy around her neck. Sometimes, she can swear she feels it pulsing against her skin, as if her parents are there with her, as if they’ve never really left. 

Behind her, voices. 

She ducks further between the x-wings, not yet ready to have to interact with anybody. 

“Sir, there’s been a significant uptick in Imperial chatter about an infiltration. At least three of our high level sources have issued partial confirmations tonight alone,” a woman’s voice says. 

“I’m sure there are plenty of infiltrations across the Rebellion, why is this one urgent?” Cassian. Jyn whips her head around towards them, crouching beneath a droid crane to conceal herself further. 

“We believe it’s someone in Echo Base, sir” A beat of silence. A mole on Hoth? It couldn’t be. The base’s communications were so tightly locked down it’d be nigh on impossible to get a message to the Empire out without half the Rebellion knowing first. Cassian expresses the same sentiment. 

“A sleeper agent, maybe. Or they’ve got a sophisticated method of communication.”

“Or?” Cassian asks, expectantly. 

“Or they’re embedded in communications or intelligence.” 

She can hear them start to move towards her. She reels herself backwards, away from the sound of their footsteps.

And she falls.

Her foot slides from underneath her, losing its traction on a patch of ice she hadn’t noticed. She grasps wildly for purchase, only managing to dislodge a hydrospanner which clatters to the ground at roughly the same time she does. 

Cassian and the duty officer run to where she is. Cassian looks between her and the hydrospanner she has inadvertently grabbed. 

“Jyn—?” 

•º

The supply run had been simple enough. Jump to Chandrila, intercept and “steal” a cargo shipment that had been conveniently left unguarded, make two subsequent jumps to mask their trail, then return to Hoth. Wes and Shira were left with the rather more dull duty of flying the cargo transport, while Luke and Wedge had been left to man the escort in their x-wings. 

The pickup had been uneventful. Mon Mothma’s contacts on Chandrila had proven their worth several times over and this latest cargo shipment was just another entry on an ever-growing list of ways the Alliance would be eternally indebted to the Chandrilans. 

It‘s nice flying with Luke. There’s a simplicity to how they fly together, an almost-choreographed elegance to how they weave and twist between and around one another. The strength of their in-air partnership settles a layer of calm over every mission they jointly take part in. This particular mission had been so easy that multiple times Wedge had caught himself babbling over their private comm link.

“Chandrila really is a second rate Naboo,” he says as he prepares to make their second, obfuscating jump to hyperspace. “I’ve only been a couple times but I just can’t see the appeal.” A moment of static across the link teeters him on the precipice of anxiety. 

“I’ve heard that Corellia is a second-rate Coruscant,” Luke says. 

“You watch your mouth, farmboy, or I’ll blast you to the next sector.” Luke’s laugh reverberates over the private comm link, warm and full. 

His laughter is cut off by a shrill, ear splitting alarm behind Wedge’s head. The squadron comm link whistles into activity. 

“Heads up boys, we got company,” Shira’s warning confirms what Wedge’s cockpit comp is screeching at him, “four Ties coming your way, look alive.” 

He jams the steering controls down, throwing the x-wing up into a punchy climb before slamming the controls back down, flipping the ship over in a taut circular manoeuvre. As he reaches the apex of the flip, the Ties zoom below him, too close for comfort. He wails on the laser cannons, risking a glance across the vast tableau laid out in front of him to watch Luke nail one of his Tie would-be assailants dead in the wing pylon, sending it hurtling into the second oncoming Tie. Wedge tears his eyes away from the fireworks to watch as he scores one hit on the engine panel of the Tie closest to him. 

Luke burns sky above him, dropping down to his level to smash out two neatly-timed cannon blasts that make quick work of the last Tie. Luke proffers an informal salute through his viewport before peeling back behind Wedge. He mirrors Luke’s movement to refocus on the slow-moving battle cruiser than had hauled up behind Wes and Shira’s transport. 

“You know, for just an hour I’d like to know what it’s like to fly with the Force watching my back,” he says.

“It’s almost as good as having you watch my back,” Luke says casually. Wedge flushes and feels his breath falter. 

Above him, the unmistakable green light of a Tie laser cannon flashes, bathing everything in the cockpit in a sickly malachite wash. It makes brutal, merciless contact with the tip of Luke’s starboard s-foil, sending him spiralling wildly. 

“Jump! Jump! I’m patching the coordinates over, make the jump,” Shira’s frantic voice calls over the comm-link, before the transport she’s on vanishes into hyperspace. 

Wedge doesn’t move a muscle until Luke’s x-wing has gone the same way as the transport. It stutters uncomfortably before it makes the jump, and Wedge’s stomach knots. Then, it’s his turn to hustle through time and space.

The star lines round out into the weave of constellations above Hoth far too slowly for his taste. His heart is beating in his head and adrenaline is coursing through his veins like fire. Barely a kilometre ahead of him, Luke’s x-wing whirls with dangerous speed towards the planet’s atmosphere. He tries fruitlessly to comm Luke, but there’s no connection. 

“Shira, I’m going to follow Luke to the crash site, you guys get to base,” he instructs, before locking his sensors onto Luke and ramping up his speed to catch up. 

The cannon shot must have fucked up the x-wing more than he’d anticipated; the whole ship glows red as it passes through Hoth’s thin atmosphere, before getting caught up in the power magnetic sphere that encircles the icy planet. The strong magnetism acts as a slingshot, hurtling Luke ever faster towards the ground. 

It seems that Luke has managed to wrest control of the crashing ship. It skids along the ground kicking up a great cloudburst of snow before it comes to rest against a snow bank.

Wedge pulls a landing manoeuvre that could only be described as utterly reckless, bringing the x-wing to a stop by counterposing the ship’s forward momentum with a dangerous turn in the snow, whipping it around to a screeching stop. 

He practically flings himself out of the cockpit, running hard despite the incredible resistance of the knee-deep snow. He snaps his helmet off, throwing it unceremoniously into the snow behind him. He boosts himself onto the s-foil of Luke’s x-wing as a second helmet goes flying into the snow, revealing a blustered but otherwise unharmed Luke. 

Wedge drops to his knees in front of Luke, the adrenaline making his body feel like it’s still rushing headlong through space. Before he can stop himself, before his brain even recognises what it’s doing, he clutches Luke’s face between his hands and kisses him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Theron](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Theron_Nett/Legends)
> 
> [Biggs](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Biggs_Darklighter)
> 
> [General Syndulla](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Hera_Syndulla)
> 
> [Bith](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bith)
> 
> The [Twin Suns Outpost](http://twinsunsoutpost.com/blog/2017/3/18/tatooines-twin-suns-history-revealed) logo is what I imagine Luke having on his x-wing


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey folks,  
> Things might slow down soon with updates, I am unfortunately having to actually focus on coursework (ugh), but I have planned and begun drafting up to chapter seven. Thanks for sticking with me xxx

Luke drops into the snow bank next to Wedge, his face flushed pink. 

“You hear that beeping?” He asks, swivelling his head around. He tries his best, he really does, but comes up with nothing and shrugs correspondingly at Luke. Luke puts his palm up, instructing him to stay where he is. Wedge has no reason to move, so he doesn’t. He watches Luke trudge through the snow, placing his hand on his busted ship at seemingly random points. 

After a few minutes, during which time Wedge is certain his ears have frozen so badly they’ll never be recovered, Luke shouts, “got it!”

He appears from the back of his x-wing holding a small, rounded piece of metal. 

“A homing beacon?” Wedge asks, taking the object from Luke and turning it over in his hands.

“Explains how the Imps showed up out of nowhere back there.” 

“We gotta shut it down,” Wedge says, dropping the beacon to the snowy ground, and reaching for his blaster. Before his hand even grazes the weapon, Luke has ignited his lightsaber, delicately slicing through the beacon.

“Show off,” Wedge says and Luke winks. He has to bend over to pick up the pieces to hide the blush spilling onto his cheeks. 

“You go comm Echo Base and let them know we’re okay and need some speeders,” he tells Luke, straightening up to face him. 

Luke leans forward, placing his cold hand on the nape of Wedge’s neck to pull his head forward, and plants a kiss on his forehead. Luke marches away, the sound of his boots muffled by the wailing wind. He stands stunned for a moment, worried that if he moves he’ll finally lose the battle with gravity.   
  


•°

“A tracking beacon, sir, installed on the side of Lieutenant Skywalker’s x-wing. We believe it may have been how the Empire ambushed us on our supply mission,” Antilles says, cautiously depositing the fragments of said beacon on the briefing room table. Cassian leans forward, grabbing the scraps and turning them over in his hand. 

“Did you make any stops during the mission? How could the tracker have been installed?” General Organa asks, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. Antilles glances towards Skywalker, an obvious nervous tic. 

“We did not. We believe the beacon was installed on Echo Base.” Anxiety blankets the room, and the General pulls back almost imperceptibly from the table, her eyes flicking briefly around the room. Her moment of doubt is over as quickly as it starts. 

Cassian, for his part, knows exactly where to look. Just metres away from him, sitting at her station focussing on her decoding equipment, headphones firmly fastened over her ears, is Jyn. He is whisked back to that night in the hangar, Jyn on her back on the icy floor, a hydrospanner in her hands and a stunned look on her face. 

A chill that has nothing to do with Hoth’s climate darts down his spine. 

•°

From the moment she had woken up, she had been haunted by her father. In the corner of her eyes he still looks like did the last time she’d really seen him — not on Eadu, where he’d died in her arms, but on Lah’mu, the last time he had fully been her father, the last time she had been a child. 

She doesn’t know if she’s mourning more for him, or for the girl she once was, but the pain sits high in her chest, pushing down on her body like a hydraulic press. 

It’s a strange thing, this pain. She thinks it should be resolved by now. Her father had given his life for a higher purpose, she had prepared to give hers, too, interrupted only by that higher power, by people who hadn’t known her name or her sins. The pain should have reached its narrative end. And yet here it is, still with her, seemingly the only constant presence in her life. 

The reverence with which the rebels have treated her in the weeks since Scarif unnerves her. It’s as though she’s a living martyr, not fully of this world anymore. And in truth, she does _feel_ the latter part, her time was stolen from others, from those who had been massacred on the beaches of Scarif. This new version of her feels too precarious, too tentative, like even the slightest breeze could shatter the house of cards she’s built to shelter herself. 

The work she does — decoding Imperial and smuggler communication signals — is good for keeping her mind busy, but it does little for dulling the emotions that fill her body from the tips of her toes to the crown of her head.

The assignment is, as Jyn had put it to Bodhi in the mess hall earlier that morning, ‘bitch work’, so unsophisticated as to be insulting.

The signal transmission she is currently decoding is unsettlingly familiar to her, an octal code used by the shipbuilders on Fondor to describe inner-planetary and sometimes inner-sector ship movements. The code was notoriously easy to unravel, and relied instead on the sheer volume of its usage to overwhelm and deter potential eavesdroppers.

She stares for a brief moment at the transmission she has just decoded, easily the hundredth she’s done today alone. 

_Repair. DRDO. 1. Uncovered. OS1321.6._

If the Rebels were to continue waging a war of attrition, there could be no better strike point than this. If the plan was to continue chipping away at the Empire’s armour, this would be like blowing the visor off their helmet. She stands, dropping her headphones to her desk with a loud clunk before making her way to the briefing table where Cassian is speaking in hushed tones to Commander Krannurak and General Draven. 

“Sirs,” she says with a brusquely formal nod.

“I’ve just decrypted some information that could be of value,” she spins her datapad to show them the message. “This is a transmission from the Fondorian shipyards. They’re bringing in a dreadnought with inactive shields for repair. This number here — OS1321.6 — refers to the orbital shipyard and sector. OS1321 is a quiet shipyard on the far side of the planet, sector six is the farthest end of that shipyard.”

“They’re repairing a dreadnought at it?” Draven asks, eyebrow crooked. 

“Yes sir, I suspect it might be the dreadnought damaged at the skirmish above Akrit’tar a few day cycles ago. As for its exile to that over shipyard… it’s likely to minimise attention drawn to it, this particular orbital shipyard maintains altitude above a relatively uninhabited region of the planet. And we _have_ heard of some potentially sympathetic unrest under the planet. By docking it above one of the more desolate regions, they’ve optimised secrecy from the ground, but sacrificed protection from above.” Draven nods. 

“And what would your recommendation be, Lieutenant Erso?” Krannurak asks, taking the data pad from her and reading the code for himself. 

“Send a strike team in, bomb out the dreadnought while the shields are still deactivated. It’s not every day we get a clear shot at a dreadnought, and there are only so many the Empire has in commission. This is a relatively low-cost way of making a big statement.”

Cassian and Krannurak look to Draven, who pauses for a moment, eyes fixed on the code. Jyn holds her breath. 

“Yes, go ahead. I’ll arrange the strike team, what artillery will you need?” She pauses, fingering the datapad, drawing up the plans in her head. 

“Bombers, sir, and a fighter squadron to accompany them. Three squadrons total will be enough,” she tells him, her mind whirring as she tries to envision all the things she’ll need to sort before sending them out. 

“Fine,” he glances at the chrono on the briefing table, “we’ll scramble the fighters for departure at 1300 hours. Captain Andor, you’ll be the primary on this casefile. Be prepared to brief the squadron leaders at 1245.”

“Yes sir,” Cassian says, standing stock straight. 

“Thank you, sir,” Jyn says, her breath shallow. 

  
  


At 1244 she stands beside Cassian in the main hangar bay, a collection of datapads in her gloved hands. Cassian has deferred to her for the briefing, and her stomach knots as she prepares herself. It’s the first briefing she’s ever given, and doing it in front of no less than thirty pilots — most of whom she doesn’t know — is not an easy start. 

She watches the chrono flip over to 1245 and steps forward into the circle of pilots that has amassed around her. “The brief is simple,” she begins and realises how quickly her voice is lost amidst the whirl of activity in the hangar. She clears her throat and begins again, “we’ve identified a vulnerable dreadnought at an orbital shipyard on Fondor. Your mission is to target and disable that dreadnought, destroy it if you can. Our intelligence indicates that the dreadnought’s shields will be down, and that it is under repair at a typically under-guarded yard. Any questions?”

A tall, blonde pilot raises his hand. She recognises him from a party she’d tagged along to, and racks her brain for his name.

Hobbie. Hobbie Klivian. 

She nods at him. 

“Won’t the shipyard have shields?” A fair question. 

“Typically, yes, but our information indicates that the finances of the Fondor shipyards have been in a state of disarray for some time now, and as such have only been paying for shield generators at their main shipyards. In choosing such an isolated shipyard, the Empire have guaranteed less surface-level interference but have, fortunately for us, left themselves vulnerable from above.” Hobbie steps back, satisfied.

She looks around the circle of pilots. Her eyes pass absentmindedly over Bodhi until she doubles back and realises that it is him. He fits so naturally in among them. He’s kneeling in front of Shira, whose auburn hair, now swept into a low bun, is like a shock against her orange flight suit. She, too, fits in in a way Jyn never could. 

She claps her hands together, startling even herself. 

“Right. In that case… may the Force be with you.” 

•°

Because it’s such a low-profile mission, Jyn’s been given a significant amount of autonomy from her commanding officers, and even Cassian had chosen to bow out several hours ago, leaving her to herself. She’d had a few occasional check-ins with the squadron leaders to monitor their progress, but besides that, the room is silent. 

She’s parked herself in the command room, working on her side portfolio. She’s combing recovered Old Republic data files for potential replacements for the Hoth base. So far, she’s compiled thick files on several suitable planets, but she still needs to put feelers out to get an accurate assessment of the on-the-ground situation. 

The pilots have been airborne four hours when they finally drop out of hyperspace.

The comms chatter blows the room up with sound. She pulls on her headset to muffle it, wanting to wrest as much control as possible over the situation. She can hear the playful chatter of the pilots as they prepare to swoop in over the deadline, brief bouts of laughter, the occasional flirtation. For the briefest of seconds, her heart lurches at the thought of that kind of camaraderie. 

As quickly as the comm-link comes to life, all hell breaks loose. Something very, very bad has happened. The previously lighthearted chatter of the pilots is replaced by frantic commands. The desperate sounds of the squadron leaders trying to account for their pilots rings in her ears. Her blood pumps through her veins like fire, and her stomach flips. 

Reaching over to the briefing table, she flips on the battle holograph, her eyes darting around the model as she tries to get a grasp of what’s going on. 

Her heart collapses in her chest as she watches one, two bombers drop off the tracking centre. Her datapads clatter to the floor. 

“It’s a trap!” Someone yells over the comms, and Jyn sinks back into her chair, watching another bomber disappear. Then an x-wing flickers off the holograph. The retreat is called before her brain catches up to the voices streaming through her headset. 

One by one and then all at once the ships fall back into the hyperspace lanes.

Her blood runs cold. 

The wait for the pilots’ return is the longest four hours of her life. 

She sprints to find Cassian, updates him on the situation. In turn, he finds Krannurak and Draven. Her fingers tremble. 

Heart thudding so loudly she’s certain everybody in a five kilometre radius can hear it, Jyn straightens her spine, unrolls her shoulders, and delivers the bad news. 

Neither commanding officer says anything, they just look to Cassian and disappear back into the catacomb-like hallways of Echo Base. Her jaw clenched of its own accord, sending cracks of pain into her head. 

Jyn spends the remaining three hours pacing the hangar, rechecking her decryptions and all the other intelligence that had fed into her decision. She chews her bottom lip until it bleeds, and then chews it more. She only stops when a single drop of blood tumbles to the ice below her. 

When they are two hours out, Commander Narra of the Red Squadron comms top request the medbay is prepped. Rather than comming the medbay, Jyn takes the peculiar step of physically walking over to make the request, her legs stiff and her head sore. 

She swears to herself that she will never again manage a mission from the base. She cannot and will not stand by as other people get hurt, while she remains in safety. 

At one hour out, the squadron leaders begin reporting their casualties. Five y-wings gone from Gold Squadron, two x-wings from Blue Squadron, and one from Red. She squeezes her eyes shut, trying not to imagine which member of Red Squadron it is. 

Her head screams no, but her heart is crying out to know the name of the person whose time she has stolen. 

At ten minutes out, Cassian and Krannurak rejoin her in the hangar, each prepared with soldierlike composure for the debriefing she’s about to endure. 

When the cavalry arrives, it’s not as bad as Jyn had built it up in her head to be. Yes, there are the wounded who are immediately carted away to the medbay, and Gold Squadron look shellshocked as they descend from their y-wings, touch each other’s arms and backs to catalogue who the survivors are. But the worst of the non-fatal damage appears to be limited to some plasma scoring, some fixable injuries, and bruised egos. 

Jyn hates herself. 

She cannot meet Wedge’s eye as he and Narra approach. 

The debrief is simple but painful. The dreadnought had, in fact, been at the shipyard she’d discovered, but it had been fully shielded and prepared for battle. There had been no fewer than six Tie squadrons waiting, too. 

“It appears,” Krannurak says, peach skin burning red, “that we were fed false intelligence.”

When the debrief is done, Cassian nudges her, handing her a datapad. It lists the names of the dead and wounded. 

“Bodhi’s hurt.”

Jyn runs like the wind. 

  
  


•°

Wedge has been sitting on the floor of Luke and Bodhi’s shared quarters for hours. Just a few weeks ago, Bodhi’s initiation into Red Squadron had mandated his room assignments be altered. Wedge is not too proud to admit that when he heard the squadron’s quarters were being shuffled he had hoped he would end up rooming with Luke. No such luck came his way, though he supposed it might be better for everyone that that particular wish never came to fruition. 

Luke, miracle that he is, has sat in silence, legs wrapped around Wedge’s waist, his fingers carding through his black hair. 

Despite all the psychological barriers he has thrown up the death of yet another one of his squad mates has upset him deeply. Her name was Ishale Corr, she was from Alderaan, just a few months younger than Luke, and has an older brother, Ilias, who is embedded on a SSD in the Outer Rim. All of these facts are things Wedge has tried to not know, tried to not remember. 

Luke pulls him back so he is lying against his chest, crossing his arms over Wedge’s bare chest, hugging him tightly. 

“Let’s go see Bodhi,” Luke murmurs against Wedge’s head, pressing a light kiss where his breath lands.

  
  


The medbay is more sedate than he’d expected, either he’d inflated the number of injured in his head or the medics had been able to clear people quickly. He checks the databoard with bed assignments; the Red casualties are at the far end of the room – just one of them. It is almost, almost a relief. 

Luke starts towards the back and Wedge follows, dazed. There are more empty beds than filled. A small mercy. 

Bodhi is surrounded by well-wishers. Ringed around his bedside are Captain Andor, Jyn, the two older Rogue One alumni he recognises as Baze Malbus and Chirrut Imwe, and now Luke. 

“How is he?” Luke asks, patting the bedsheet at the foot of Bodhi’s bed. 

“He’ll be alright,” Baze says, slowly looking up towards Luke. 

“The Force is watching over him,” Chirrut adds, in that same unflappable tone he seems to use to approach everything and everyone. 

Wedge looks to Jyn, who has thus far not acknowledged their presence, her eyes trained on Bodhi’s sleeping face, her hand tightly clasping his. Wedge had watched Bodhi’s x-wing get hammered by an electrical shock blasted out by one of the Imperial capital ships. He had been prepared to mourn for Bodhi. 

“What happened?” A new voice asks from behind him, and he turns to look. Shira, still dressed in her flight suit, is approaching them, her left hand bandaged but otherwise she is apparently unharmed. 

Wedge rubs his cheek, feeling the rough stubble. He needs a shave. 

“Just an electrocution,” Andor says primly, “he’ll be out in a few days.” 

“No,” Shira says, sitting on the foot of Bodhi’s bed, “I mean what happened?” She waves her hand in the air to emphasise the point. “What the hell went wrong out there?” He looks to Jyn, whose jaw has tightened noticeably but whose eyes have not wavered from Bodhi.

“Bad intelligence,” Wedge says after a moment’s silence. 

“I’ll say,” Shira says curtly. “They were waiting for us. That couldn’t have gone worse if we’d brought the Imperial marching band with us to announce our arrival.” Wedge sighs. She’s not wrong.

“It happens with new intelligence officers. Sometimes they decrypt things wrong, or they don’t realise the stakes of the game yet and just want the wins and end up getting reckless,” he explains before he knows what he’s saying, who he’s saying it in front of. 

Jyn finally looks at him and he realises his mistake immediately. Her eyes are filled with sadness, but her jaw is taut. “My decryption was good.”

“I— I believe that. It’s just that sometimes without having seen the casualties of carelessness it’s easy to run headlong into things, to not do due diligence.”

“You,” she stands, placing Bodhi’s hand back down on the bed with such care it makes Wedge’s heart ache, “do not have the monopoly on caring. No matter how much you want to think you’ve suffered more than the rest of us, sacrificed more than the rest of us. You are not the only one who feels the pain of these failures, Wedge.” She spits the next words out, “I have been living this my whole life.” 

She storms away. Nobody follows her. 

After several moments of uncomfortable silence, Shira says, “Well that was very defensive.” 

The silence resumes. 

“It reminds me of when my brother would get caught in a lie and try to blame it on me for being mean,” she says, following it up with a light tinkling laugh. 

Wedge shifts his weight between his feet. 

_A lie?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Lah'mu](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lah%27mu)
> 
> [Fondor](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Fondor/Legends); I've linked to the Legends entry because that's the iteration of Fondor I'm more familiar with.
> 
> [Akrit'tar](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Akrit%27tar/Legends) #JusticeForTycho
> 
> [HOBBBIIEEEEEEE](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Derek_Klivian/Legends)


	5. Chapter 5

Jyn creeps back to Bodhi’s bedside late at night when she’s certain everyone else has left. Dinner had been a blur, she’d hardly touched her food despite Baze’s repeated attempted interventions. They had, perhaps unintentionally, left a space for Bodhi at their table, and the sight of the empty space had rocked Jyn to her core, nauseating her. 

She bows her head against his mattress, clutching his hand tightly, as if he’ll slip away if she loosens her grip. 

Every mistake that has led her to this point flashes through her mind. Every moment of weakness that has landed Bodhi in this damned bed. She can almost feel the blood on her hands. 

Something rustles behind her, and she snaps her head up. 

Cassian. 

“Jyn, it’s late,” he murmurs, still leaving what feels like an ocean of space between them. 

She doesn’t speak. 

“He’ll be fine,” he continues, cocking his head towards Bodhi, “he’ll be there in the morning. Come.” He offers his hand to her, an impossible bridge across the ocean. 

She looks to Bodhi, watches his slow, unlaboured breathing. 

She takes Cassian’s hand. 

•°

She doesn’t remember the walk to her quarters, doesn’t remember falling to the bed, doesn’t remember Cassian sitting beside her. 

“It’s okay,” he whispers, pulling her parka off her shoulders and depositing it onto the chair that sits beside her cot. She nods lamely, more for her sake than his. “Bad intel is bad intel, you can’t change that.”

“I don’t care about the intel,” she says, steely as ever. 

“Those people… they knew what they were signing up for. You can’t be in this fight and plan to come out of it alive, that’s unrealistic.” 

And, against all her instincts, Jyn cries. 

She collapses into Cassian’s shoulder, her body quaking with sorrow and desperation and so many other emotions she doesn’t know how to name. She fists Cassian’s shirt, pulling him closer to her, needing to feel some sort of connection to reality. 

He adjusts her so that she’s crying into his chest, wrapping his arms under her arms and hoisting her up. She wraps her legs around his waist and comes to rest in his lap, still sobbing in a voice that sounds nothing like her own. 

“If I hadn’t gotten off Scarif those people would still be alive today. They could’ve done so much more — so much more than I could ever do.” 

He holds her tighter but says nothing. This she takes as a confirmation of her beliefs. Humiliation surges through her. 

She scrambles away from him, pressing herself against the wall to create as much distance as she possibly can. 

“Get out,” she sobs. 

“Jyn—“ 

“Get out.” 

•°

Hours later, Cassian, exhausted and emotionally compromised, receives the one assignment he had never, ever wanted to get: a mole hunt. 

He is dragged out of bed in the early hours of the morning. Groggy, with limbs like lead, he stands before the Alliance Intelligence Command, wondering what sins he had to have committed to face such a punishment. 

The uncontrollable part of his brain answers by listing his sins. He winces. 

Nobody is off limits, they tell him, and he puts his hands onto the table in front of him, leaning into it for support. He hopes it telegraphs alertness, instead of the fatigue it’s actually combatting. 

He should use any means necessary, but keep the inquiry a secret, if the existence of the investigation becomes known, he must terminate it immediately. His shoulder feels hollow where Jyn had been crying against it. 

Reports will have to be administered by dead drop to a location of Draven’s choosing, changed each week. Even the intelligence duty officer the day of the drop cannot know of the reports’ location or existence. 

Cassian says nothing, just nods and drags himself out of the room, head spinning despite his tiredness. 

He notices himself doing double takes at every being he passes in the corridors on the way back to his quarters; cataloguing what they’re doing, what they’re wearing, who they’re with, and what their body language indicates. 

He looks in the mirror in the ‘fresher and wonders what assessment he would make of himself, if he could. His stomach churns at the thought. 

He is a naturally suspicious person, has always been standoffish, never quick to let people in.

_Except for Jyn,_ the wild part of his brain reminds him. 

He slams his fist down on the countertop, using the pain to silence his thoughts. If tears threaten his eyes, he swears it’s from the shock of the pain. 

•°

A few days later, when Bodhi is discharged from the medbay, Jyn is there.

He is strong, only kept back the extra day to ensure he could be flight-ready sooner, and to give him an extra night of solid sleep. 

She follows him back to his quarters, settling into listening to him chatter away. He is eager to get back to flying, flattered by how many people had come to visit him, excited by the feeling that he belongs here. He is all the light and joy and goodness that Jyn once thought did not exist in the galaxy. As he sinks down onto his cot with his back against the wall, she allows herself a smile: this is one person she has not lost. 

She kicks her boots off, sitting on the bed with her back against the opposite wall. 

“I don’t think you did anything wrong, you know,” Bodhi says, and Jyn, startled, looks up at him.

“You seem to be the only one.” She reaches for a bit of loose thread on the blanket, tying it off. 

“They’re just scared, I think. Everything has been going so well since the Death Star that I think some of them have forgotten we’re fighting a really badly lopsided war. It’s not just that losses are gonna happen, it’s that they’re going to happen more often than the successes, and with so many successes recently, it’s scary to think the magnitude of the losses we’re going to face to rebalance the scales.”

Jyn, not un-comforted, regards Bodhi. Bodhi, who had been allowed by the Empire to only be a cargo pilot, Bodhi, who is wise beyond his years and braver than he is wise by tenfold. Bodhi, who will forever bare the scars on his hands from _catching and throwing a grenade_ that ultimately led to him saving a dozen or more lives on Scarif. 

“Cassian is…” She trails off, unsure of what to say. Cassian is what? Unable to read her mind? 

“Cassian is concerned with a mole.” 

Jyn racks her brain for memory of this mole, where they will have been stationed. There are too many to keep track of, but none are even close to being comprised, so what need is there for Cassian to be stressed?

“A mole? Which mole?” Bodhi raises an eyebrow and realisation hits Jyn like a freight train.

“ _Here_?!” She whispers, looking around as if there’s not nothing else in this room besides her and Bodhi. 

“Yeah. He told me about it — or more like said it at me while he thought I was asleep. Apparently Intelligence Command has told him nobody’s off-limits and everyone has to be investigated. Even at the highest levels, you know.” Jyn has a bitter taste in her mouth. 

Why didn’t Cassian tell her? Sure, he hadn’t exactly meant to tell Bodhi but he still said it to him. And Jyn works with him, could have given him advice or helped him figure out where to start. Rooting out the disloyal was something she’d had to do a million times with Saw, she knew all the telltale signs of a rat. 

“After that tracking beacon they found on Luke’s ship, I guess it became undeniable that we’ve been compromised,” Bodhi continues. 

And then she realises why Cassian hadn’t come to her. That night in the hangar, before that supply mission that had almost gotten Luke killed. If she had stumbled upon that tableau even she would be suspicious of herself. But does that mean Cassian suspects her? Surely not, surely he knows her well enough to know her incapable of something like that. 

But does he really? The mere months they’ve known each other wouldn’t be enough to convince her of anybody else’s trustworthiness, so perhaps Cassian is holding the logical position of mistrusting her until she can definitively prove her worth. It crushes her to think about, but it’s the kind of utilitarian view of relationships she has had to have her whole life, there’s no reason to go weak now. 

Her thoughts are interrupted by the door of Bodhi’s quarters whirring open. Luke is thrust forward into the room, his back is to them, but she can tell his golden hair anywhere. Outside of his hair, he is basically indistinguishable from Wedge, who is pressed against him so completely Jyn momentarily wonders if they’ve _actually_ become one person. 

Jyn coughs, pushing herself off the bed.

She realises too late that this has put her uncomfortably close to the mass of sexual explicitness that she had been trying to break up. The two men split apart. Luke turns a bright shade of pink. She doesn’t look at Wedge.

“Oh please, Erso, as if you and Andor aren’t constantly steaming up the hallways with your PDA,” Luke responds with that easy familiarity that always catches Jyn off guard. Now it’s Bodhi’s turn to cough. Both men look to Bodhi, who anxiously shakes his head. 

“See you, Bodhi,” she calls, pulling her boots on and walking quickly out the door. She briefly, mistakenly catches Wedge’s eye. He starts to open his mouth to say something, but Jyn hits the door release button before he gets the chance. 

•°

Cassian has been forcing himself to go to all three meals for the better part of two weeks now to keep up appearances. He knows Chirrut knows he doesn't actually eat his food, but he also knows he has to accept that Chirrut will always know more than he should. All this stuff with the force goes over his head, unsettles him, even, so he doesn't press the issue.

Jyn, the consummate actress, chats easily with everybody, recognising Cassian only enough to minimise questions from prying eyes, but not so much as to potentially give him room to talk to her. His chest pangs. He forces the feeling down like it’s just a case of the hiccups, instead of his heart threatening to shatter. 

His investigation has been going poorly at the best of times, slowed by a litany of reasons, chief among which is his reticence to pursue the most obvious route. He wants to involve Jyn, wants her to steady his head and his hand through this, but knows that he would face untold punishments if he dared to loop her in. So instead he has accepted the iciness that has built up between them, that has split them in half. 

After dinner, he follows her without meaning to. 

Trailing along at Jyn’s heels is still second nature, even now, and it’s only when she turns down a dead-end corridor and wheels around to face him that he comes to his senses. 

“What are you doing?” She demands, stalking towards him. 

“I—“

“If this is because of that tracking beacon you know it wasn’t me. You know why I was in the hangar that night so don’t you dare go pinning this on me.”

He feels like he’s stepped into the heart of a storm. 

“What? Tracking bea–“ he stops himself. He steps back, to give her more space, to make her feel less cornered. 

“Jyn that’s not why I—“

“Leave me alone.”

And like so many times before, she leaves him with his head spinning. 

•°

Wedge is in a particularly bad mood, grimacing at the laughter that echoes across from the opposite side of the mess. 

“This escort should be exciting,” Luke says, brightness in his eyes. “I’ve never met anybody from Jelucan before.” 

“There’s nothing much to it,” Hobbie responds, shovelling food into his mouth. “Just some rocks and some ice.” 

“Lots of planets are just rock and ice,” Shira interjects, sliding onto the bench next to Luke. 

“Yeah but how many of them are interesting?” Hobbie counters, pulling an untouched piece of bread off Wedge’s tray. He doesn’t protest. 

They descend into a pointless argument over the interestingness of various planets that continues to Wedge’s distinct annoyance until they’re climbing into their x-wings an hour later. 

When they’re in the air, he looks out across his squadron. They’re not, technically, his squadron — he’s only second in command — but he has the unfortunate habit of feeling deep ownership over everything he’s apart of. He lets an errant thought cross his mind: do these people know they’re all under investigation? 

Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t even know _he’s_ under investigation. Cassian let it slip to Bodhi who muttered it in his sleep while Luke had been awake, who then told Wedge hurriedly in the morning over breakfast before anyone else joined them. 

Wedge is confident enough in his loyalty to know he couldn’t seriously be considered a contender, but the whole thing casts a web of paranoia around his actions with everyone on base that he hasn’t had to deal with since Skystrike. It unsettles him. 

  
  


Their mission is simple: rendezvous with a small fleet of Jelucan defectors and escort them to Hoth. It’s the kind of routine op that Wedge has done so many times in his two years with the rebellion he’s sure he could do it in his sleep. And yet, as with everything in his life, he approaches it with the kind of steadfast alertness most people reserve for only the most intense moments of their existence. 

Even still, the simplicity of the mission gives him time to think, something he hasn’t had much of lately. But here, suspended within the inky black of space, his thoughts have the room to unfurl themselves, stretching out like the star lines that surround him. 

He’s confident in the people around him that this mole business doesn’t really rattle him. There’s nobody in the squadron he would even look twice at if someone asked him the question, but it has made him question some fundamental things about the life he’s leading. Not about his involvement in the Rebellion, nothing could do that, not after everything, but about how he relates to it, to the people in it. 

This thing that he has with Luke — whatever it is he doesn’t know, they haven’t exactly discussed it —, it makes him vulnerable. Vulnerable, maybe, in a way he’s not fully prepared for. Casual sex is one thing, as much a fact of life in the Rebellion as breathing or eating, but with this he knows he’s in too deep. He doesn’t even know what Luke thinks about the whole thing, what Luke thinks of him. He could be reading this all wrong, have invested so much more emotional energy than is appropriate, and he probably wouldn’t even know until it’s too late. It’s not like it’s affecting his work or anything, he can still fly straight and file paperwork and whatever other bullshit he has to do, but it could. 

And someday (even though Luke seems to be mostly in denial about it right now) he’s going to have to go off and fully take up the mantle of the last Jedi. It seems unlikely Ezra’s ever coming back, that is, if he’s even still alive, and Ahsoka has disappeared off to who knows where. Luke is all the galaxy has left, for now. And that’s going to mean… well what it’s going to mean Wedge isn’t sure, but it’s probably going to mean a path he can’t follow. And it’s not even the fact that all of this is a terrible, anxious possibility, it’s that it’s been mere weeks since they even kissed for the first time and already Wedge is tearing himself apart over it all. 

He eases his ship into escort formation besides the Jelucan capital ship, worrying his bottom lip. Luke’s x-wing slides into position to his left, and he can feel his heart rate spike. 

Over the comm-link, Narra speaks:

“Welcome to the Rebellion.”

•°

Across the stars, a masked man approaches his hooded master. 

Servants scurry away, leaving the two to an empty room. A mouse droid scampers by, its wheels squeaking faintly against the chromium floor. 

“Will she come?”

“Yes, my master. It is inevitable.” An artificial breath croaks out across the deserted hall. “And she will bring… my son.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Jelucan](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Jelucan)  
> [Ahsoka](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ahsoka_Tano/Legends) [Borat voice] my wife  
> [Ezra](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ezra_Bridger), my son


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this was so slow to come, coursework is really kicking my ass right now.
> 
> Thank you for all your supportive comments, I can't tell you how much it means to me (really!!)
> 
> Come visit me on [tumblr](https://arethainparis.tumblr.com/)

The days pass into weeks, and soon she starts to wonder if she was ever friends with Cassian at all. 

Wedge forces his way back into her life, though she has to admit that she did choose to let him in. Persistent personality or not, her defences are much stronger than his will. 

It helps his case, too, that she’s started spending almost all her free time with Bodhi now, burrowed away in his quarters, hiding from the world. 

It takes time, but eventually she stops talking about Cassian, stops asking Bodhi if there’s any news on the investigation, stops wondering how he’s doing, if he’s thinking about her. 

She settles into a new routine, and thinks about how settling into new routines has become a routine of its own lately. 

She eats breakfast alone, sometimes with Chirrut and Baze, if they’re up early enough. She realises one morning that she has no idea what it actually is that they do to justify staying on the base, but it’s been too long for her to ask. She resolves herself to figuring that out, yet another item on the to do list she has been frantically filling to keep her mind busy. 

She goes to work, still decrypting codes, but now more committed to keeping her head down. If she uncovers something of note, she passes it along to Caern Adan, the surprisingly upright Balosar who shares a station with her. Once it’s out of her hands, she figures, the outcome wouldn’t be her responsibility, wouldn’t weigh on her conscience. 

The work she does is making her miserable. At least when she’d done it for Saw it had been accompanied by some sort of action. Trapped here in this icy catacomb, she’s literally gasping for air, desperate to do something that isn’t sitting in front of mountains of data pads all day. She can practically feel her muscles atrophying with each passing hour. 

Still, if she eats lunch at all, it’s at her station with her headphones on. Not necessarily continuing to work, but keeping up appearances so nobody bothers her. It’s the kind of solitude in a crowd that was her comfort zone for so many years of her life. The kind of hiding in plain sight that’s second nature to her. 

In the evenings, she wanders the base until she finds Bodhi, usually outside the auxiliary hangar. When the Reds aren’t out on missions, they’re relegated to maintenance work or training games, leaving them plenty of downtime. She eats dinner with him whenever she can, sometimes Luke or Wedge or both will join them, sometimes Hobbie Klivian comes along, too. She tends to not say much, not because she dislikes her companions, but because she’s never really had much to say and doesn’t see any reason to start now. Besides, Bodhi and Luke provide enough dialogue for the entire base, chattering away like two convorees in a jungle tree. 

After dinner, if they’re not caught up by the Red’s whirlwind social commitments, she and Bodhi will wander around the base. Some nights, they talk idly about anything and everything that crosses their minds, other nights, Bodhi fills her in with singular intensity on the gossip from around the base. The Alderaanian Princess, Leia, and the _other_ hotshot Corellian pilot feature prominently.

The amount of casual sex being had around the base is astonishing. Every time she feels like she’s finally wrapped her head around some love triangle, it’s blown apart by another romantic entanglement. Most recently, Shira Brie has hooked up with Lucky Farlander, the Agmarian from Gold Squadron, leading to some hostilities on behalf of the not-insignificant number of Red Squad pilots who had it bad for Shira. 

“Me and Luke thought she was into Cassian, though, so it’s pretty surprising,” Bodhi confides one night as they’re taking a turn through the maze of hallways that span the residential area. Jyn’s stomach lurches and her chest seizes. Bodhi looks at her and from the expression on his face it’s clear she must look as taken aback as she feels. 

“We don’t think it’s reciprocated or anything, though,” he adds quickly. “Cassian’s been moping pretty heavily for weeks now. All broody anger and commitment to duty and whatever.” He waves a scarred hand to emphasise his disregard for Cassian’s more melodramatic emotions. 

“Oh,” is all she can muster. 

Their conversation pauses for a moment. Not an uncomfortable one, but one nonetheless filled by Jyn’s most burning anxieties. 

“He misses you, you know,” Bodhi finally says, taking Jyn’s hand and intertwining their fingers. It’s a display of affection and emotion she wouldn’t abide by from anyone else, but she can feel the burn scars along Bodhi’s hands from where he grabbed a grenade and saved the world, and she knows she’ll let him hold her hand forever. 

“This investigation thing, I don’t think it’s going well. I mean I get that it’s scary, the idea that there’s somebody in here, living with us day-in and day-out who’s betraying us, but it’s been weeks since anything’s gone wrong and they’re practically running Cassian into the ground over this. It’s like they’re chasing ghosts.”

“My name still isn’t cleared.”

“No, that’s true I guess. I reckon it doesn’t matter, though, not to him, not really. I know I didn’t know him before Scarif and all that, but with how he’s behaving lately I can’t see how he could’ve become one of the Alliance’s top agents if he were always like this. I think this whole unbalance thing he’s got going on right now is because you’re not around anymore. It’s really freaking him out, I think.” 

Jyn hums noncommittally. 

“You won’t talk to him?” He hazards. 

Jyn hasn’t really considered that it’s been _her_ who hasn’t been talking to _him_. 

When he walks by her station, he stiffens and averts his eyes, his face scrunched like she reeks of a foul stench. When they pass each other in the corridors, he’s as icy as the walls that entomb them. 

Sure, her ego is bruised. But with each passing day the betrayal stings a little less, fading like the scars that mar her body. Unlike the white lines on her body, the betrayal fades into numbness. As the scar tissue smooths out, the nerves under her skin rekindle and her emotions run dry, her ability to feel anything at all for Cassian disappearing.

She hasn’t slept soundly in weeks, but she’ll be damned if she admits it’s because she can’t curl up into him anymore, can’t trace their identical lightning scars to feel like something, anything, is real. 

Bodhi guides her to the Red squad rec room, which is empty save for Wedge, Narra, and a man she doesn’t recognise. Wedge is leaning against the countertop, arms folded over his chest. He looks as calm and collected as ever, and Jyn almost feels bitter with jealousy for a second. Narra is not leaning, but also has his arms folded over his chest, one hand under his chin, listening intently to the man. 

The man turns to look at them, and his features soften with recognition when he looks at Jyn. He claps his hands together, before briefly turning back to Wedge and Narra. 

“Gentlemen, I trust you’ll think about what I’ve offered,” he turns to Bodhi and Jyn, “Now, if I’m not mistaken, you must be the last two members of Rogue One I’ve yet to meet.” 

Jyn says nothing, just looks at him. 

“Uh, yes, yes sir,” Bodhi says, when the man closes the gap between them.

“That, then, must make you Bodhi Rook,” he takes Bodhi’s hand, shaking it vigorously. “And you… are Jyn Erso.” Jyn nods primly. 

“I’m Major Bren Derlin, the new head of security here on Echo Base,” he continues when neither Bodhi nor Jyn says anything. “And this really is just the best of luck, I was going to come find you tomorrow, Lieutenant Erso, but since you’re here now, I might as well get it all out!” 

Jyn feels distinctly overwhelmed by what could only be described as his _effervescence_. His aura is frenzied, like steam being forced out of a pinhole exhaust vent. 

He grabs her by the elbow, steering her out of the rec room, and she feels a little dizzied.

“Well, this is very good, really very good. I have to say I was mighty impressed by what you did on Scarif. Destroying the Death Star was one thing, yes, but taking the initiative to take on the whole Empire by yourself? And galvanising the feckless Alliance in the process? Now that’s something else entirely.” He laughs, a big, ebullient laugh that comes straight from his stomach, quaking his shoulders in the process. Jyn has never been able to laugh like that. 

“Now, I’ve been told you used to be one of Saw Gerrera’s Partisans,” Jyn opens her mouth to make excuses, an unfortunate instinct after so long on the Rebel base. He waves his hand in the air between them to cut her off. “No, no! I may not have always agreed with Saw but he was one of the best fighters on our side. Certainly the most efficient, if nothing else.”

Jyn opens her mouth again, realises she has nothing to say, and closes her mouth again. She imagines she looks like a fish. Derlin looks at her, smile lines around his eyes and mouth crinkling as he does so. He has a big, bristling moustache to match his personality, and the whiskers twitch with his smile. 

“I’ve been long fascinated with how Gerrera’s cells worked. They were practically airtight, nothing came in or out. That’s the level of security we’re going to need as this fight intensifies. Every set of eyes in the Galaxy is trained on us now, everybody’s trying to get in, discover our secrets, what we’re going to do next. As you’re our only former Partisan on base, I was wondering if you would be so good as to do me a favour?” 

She regards him for a second, amazed that the breakneck pace of his words hasn’t winded him. “Uh, and what would that favour be, sir?”

“I’m looking to start a little project. Recording and analysing the Partisans’ opsec procedures, and then building a plan to implement them here. I know what they’ve got you doing over in Intelligence — it’s all menial stuff, far below someone of your skill and experience. There are plenty of grunts they can haul in to take over from you there, I really don’t understand why they’ve relegated you to that sort of task.”

“It’s just to prove my commitment to staying in line,” she answers meekly, not fully believing it herself. 

“Yes, well, ‘staying in line’ hasn’t been the thing to win us our biggest victories, has it?”

Again, she says nothing, unsure of whether or not this is some sick loyalty test. 

“There’s no catch to this, I promise. In light of recent events, they’ve brought me in to overhaul the Alliance’s security, and this is how I feel it best to proceed.” 

Jyn pulls at the bottom of her parka, straightening out the creases around her waist in the process. Derlin taps her upper arm affably. 

“Think about it. Take some time, I know bringing up these memories can be painful, but it would be great to have you.”

With a cordial nod and a cheerful smile, he turns and goes. 

  
Jyn sways. 

•º

He’s only been awake for three hours and already Cassian has had a long day. 

A reconnaissance mission he’d sent to Honoghr had resulted in two men dead and an informant’s cover blown — not bad intelligence or a security breach, just pure, old fashioned bad luck. 

The sort of bad luck that, if he’s honest, he’s not accustomed to having anymore and looks at with a heavy dose of scepticism. It seems lately as though nothing has come down to luck alone, everything has been engineered in some way or another by some higher power. Even when it seems like things are just going wrong because, well, shit happens, it seems to have become inevitable that some malevolent actor is behind it. 

About an hour after he’s pulled out of bed, the news arrives of a new Imperial blockade on Tureen VII. The Tureenese had been covertly aiding the Alliance since a few weeks before the Battle of Yavin. Somehow, they’d been exposed and the Empire was retaliating in kind. 

And now this. 

He’s not sure what started it, really. One minute he was passing by Jyn’s station, arguing with Krannurak about how best to approach the increasingly delicate Tureen situation; the next, Jyn’s storming up to the briefing table, data pads in hand and fire in her eyes. 

It’s the first time she’s made direct eye contact with him in weeks. His heartbeat falters. 

“I’m not doing any more of this,” she hisses, slamming the pads down on the table. The smack reverberates around the room. Krannurak stops mid-sentence, startled. 

“I have proven myself trustworthy and useful at every turn, and you still refuse to give an inch. You treat me like I’m going to flip at any moment, as if my sacrifices haven’t been as great as yours, as if I haven’t been doing every bit as much subterfuge as you have. I am skilled and I am worthwhile, Cassian, and I’m not going to continue to be stymied by your little bureaucracy just because you have trust issues.” 

It’s like the air has evacuated the room. 

She’s gone as quickly as she arrived, leaving Cassian flustered and breathless; a little bit embarrassed and quite a lot more upset. 

He turns to face Krannurak, who is looking at him expectantly. The room might be silent around him, he’s not sure, it’s like he’s getting tunnel vision.

“I’ll — I’ll be back,” he says weakly, already running out after Jyn, calling her name as he goes. 

He catches up with her outside the mess hall, though it’s clear she has no intentions of actually going in. 

“Jyn. What — what was that about?” He asks when he finally comes to a stop in front of her. “You don’t talk to me for weeks and then you come out with that? You should’ve said something to me, you—“

“—don’t owe you an explanation. If you don’t trust me enough to tell me the things going on in your life. Trust is a two way street, Cassian. I thought you knew that by now.”

“What are you going to do, where are you going to go? You don’t have a ship, you can’t—“ Jyn lets out a laugh, a horrible, icy laugh that pierces soul.   
  


“You’re so obsessed with me leaving the Rebellion. You think I’m not capable of being anything more than a shirker. Cassian, I’m not leaving the Rebellion, this is my fight now, too. I’m taking up a post with base security — they at least have some respect for me.”

She is right, he is _obsessed_ with her leaving. It consumes him like a raging fire, tearing at his soul and shredding his heart. But now he wishes she was leaving the Rebellion, so that he could have confirmation that she’d committed some ultimate ideological betrayal and not have to face the truth of it. She’s not leaving the Rebellion, she’s leaving him. And that’s so much worse than he could ever have planned for.

Before he can respond, an intelligence grunt layered up to the ears in scarves and snoods and jackets approaches him. Cassian would almost find it funny if he didn’t feel like he was having his heart ripped out. 

“Captain Andor, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I was instructed to inform you that General Organa and the Red Squadron have arrived at Crait.” 

For the briefest of seconds, his brain stops dead. Crait? He hadn’t been told they were going to Crait.

He looks to Jyn, a reflex that he realises too late won’t help him here. 

Her eyes are wide and what little colour remains in her face after months on Hoth has drained. 

“Crait, that’s… that’s my… it wasn’t ready… I hadn’t…” Jyn stammers.

She looks like she’s falling apart with each word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Caern Adan](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Caern_Adan)
> 
> I think [convorees](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Convor) are so damn cute and remind me exactly of Bodhi and Luke.
> 
> [Kayan "Lucky" Farlander](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Keyan_Farlander)
> 
> [Bren Derlin](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bren_Derlin/Legends), who is, in my head, basically just any Jim Broadbent character but with a 70s pornstache lol
> 
> [The Partisans](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Partisans)
> 
> [Honoghr](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Honoghr/Legends)
> 
> [Tureen VII](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Tureen_VII)


	7. Chapter 7

Wedge has decided Crait is a terrible planet before he even drops out of his x-wing. His ship’s computer tells him the moisture readings on the surface are so low they’re practically bottoming out the meter, and the glaring whiteness of the mineral planet’s ground threatens to trigger a migraine. Plus, the bucket of bolts ski speeders they’re using to get out to their meeting point doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. 

He and Luke unload the long range communications equipment from the hulls of the rusted out speeders. General Organa stands a few metres from where they’re setting up the comms station, surveying the landscape like it’s a painting in some high class gallery on Coruscant. 

The _other_ hotshot Corellian pilot leans against one of the speeder’s skis, pointedly not doing any work. Instead, he chatters idly with Luke and his Wookie pal, Chewbacca, his eyes never leaving the General. 

Ahead of him, Luke loses his footing, letting a box of antennae tumble to the ground. 

“Nice one, Master Jedi,” Wedge calls. Luke, mid-crouch, turns and issues him a one-fingered salute. 

“Hey now, watch your mouth, Antilles,” Solo says, with one of those classic wry Corellian grins Wedge feels like he hasn’t seen in years. 

“That’s not what I said last night,” Luke counters. Solo mimes vomiting and Wedge can feel colour rising violently in his cheeks. _That’s_ a development. 

They finish setting up the communications station while the Princess and Solo go to meet with their contact. Narra and the remainder of Red Squad have stayed up in the black to conduct tests on the planet’s atmosphere and suss out its full topography, the boring sort of science stuff Wedge has never been able to fake even a passing interest in. 

Wedge is grateful for this time he gets to spend alone with Luke, it’s such a rarity. On base, they’re constantly surrounded by people. Luke’s shoulders are always so rigid with the pressure of being _the last Jedi_ , a mantle he doesn’t even fully understand the weight of. But on these quieter missions he gets to relax a bit, go back to just being the farm boy from Tatooine with a knack for tinkering with electronics and an easy, unpracticed coolness to him. 

He thinks about a different life. A life where this beautiful glowing boy standing in front of him, practically dancing across the salted ground, can live easy for a second. Where he isn’t burdened by the weight of the whole galaxy, by thousands of years of history he doesn’t even know exist. In this life they can have a future together, maybe a house on some Outer Rim planet with nice weather and nobody else for miles and miles and miles. 

It’s all stuff he’ll never be able to say to Luke, just feelings and emotions that pound like a heartbeat behind his chest. His first (his only) girlfriend, Mala, had called him emotionally repressed.

She probably wasn’t wrong — he’d been too scared to tell her that he loved her and then she’d been murdered by the Empire. He scribbled her name onto his flight helmet when he’d defected from Skystrike, hoping that seeing it every day would remind him of why he was fighting, of what loss meant. The months ticked on, though, and that sense of loss pervaded everything, until he couldn’t even remember the happy moments with her. Love wasn’t a word that factored into his vocabulary anymore. 

And then he met Luke and suddenly love was the only word he knew. 

He realises too late that he’s been staring at Luke too long. 

“What’s up Red Two?” Luke asks, flight suit pulled down around his waist to reveal the black fatigues beneath. He looks good, _real good_. And in his element. Light grease marks stripe his forehead from where he’s wiped sweat away, hydrospanner in one hand, looking like he never left Mos Espa or whatever other dusty shithole he might’ve ended up in if this war hadn’t dropped out of lightspeed right on his front door. 

Wedge shakes his head, emancipating himself from his daze. 

“You think we’ll ever get a nice planet for a base again? I miss Yavin, that was really the life.” 

“Ah, come on, this isn’t _so_ bad,” Luke responds, kicking salt dust into the air. “I mean, at least the weather’s decent enough – no gloves!” He waves his dirt stained hands in the air to prove the point.

Behind Luke, a scratching noise. 

The sand erupts, the carmine mineral beneath the white salt layer exposed in a squall of dust and movement. 

A worm, almost a metre long at full extension with a menacing, skeletal jaw chomps at air besides Luke’s leg, stymied only by Luke’s lightning fast reflexes. 

Wedge is no Jedi, the Force is silent to him, but he’s a pilot and always ratcheted up just a little too high, so his blaster is out before he registers what Luke’s saying to him. 

“Hey! Put it down! They’re just like Dune Worms back home, they won’t mess with you if you don’t mess with th—“

A blaster shot echoes across the terrain. Wedge looks to his own blaster, briefly wondering if he’d fired without realising it.

“What the hell?” Solo’s voice roars, and Luke’s off like a shot. 

“Han! Han! Don’t shoot at them, the more you fight them the harder they fight back.” 

Chewbacca foists Solo into the air, a solid foot above the ground, holding the captain back from his target. 

The worm recedes, and the Wookie roars. 

“I did too know what I was doing,” Solo spits, shaking a finger at Chewbacca once he’s unceremoniously returned to the ground. He drops his finger, then turns to Wedge and Luke. 

“Leia sent us for the comms. Looks like this is the place, then. How’s it look out here to you?” 

Luke gazes out at the mountains in the distance. 

“Like home,” he says after a moment. His shoulders round out, and Wedge can almost see the repressed grief pouring off of him. 

Whenever Luke has spoken to him about his home, it’s always come in one of two settings. Either he’s leaning into his farm boy status, playing up his hick sensibilities and wide-eyed naïveté (the sort of down-home behaviour that Biggs had steered well clear of) or he’s wistful and melancholic, burdened by the unfinished business he seems to have with the planet. 

The latter mode is something Wedge can empathise with intimately. Corellia wasn’t perfect, hell, it probably wasn’t even _good_ , but it was still his home. At first, he’d done everything in his power to avoid missions to Coronet City, but as the missions dried up and Corellia became further and further entrenched in the Empire, he longed to see his filthy, rotten hometown again. 

Han starts to lug the comms equipment, but Luke remains stock-still. Wedge approaches, gently placing an arm on Luke’s back. 

“What’s up?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Luke mumbles, scanning the horizon. 

Luke scrambles towards his rusty speeder. Wedge follows dutifully, resentful that he hadn’t pushed harder to bring their x-wings closer to the meeting site. Luke takes them several kilometres out to where large salt rocks dot the landscape. It truly feels like the barbaric frontier out here, so far from civilisation that anything could happen and nobody would ever know to tell the story. It makes Wedge feel uneasy. 

Luke brings his speeder down and vaults out of it. 

“Luke, what’s going on?” Wedge calls after him, perching on the wing of his own speeder. He looks at the salt boulder Luke’s approaching, and horror pangs through him. 

That’s no boulder. 

The bodies of people frozen mid-movement stretch out in front of them. There’s at least fifty bodies, enough to qualify this as a massacre. 

“Looks like they were flash-dried. I’ve seen something like this before in a sandstorm. But for this to happen, it would’ve had…” he trails off, running his hands through his hair nervously. “Wedge, we’ve gotta warn the others,” he yells, sprinting back to his speeder. 

They race back over the salt flat, pushing their skis to speeds that are much faster than is strictly necessary on the surface of the planet, kicking up white and red dust in their stead. 

On foot again, they careen into Solo and Chewbacca. Luke points at Leia, “We gotta — I gotta talk to her.”

“Get in line, kid,” Solo says, his jaw a tense line. 

“Leia!” Luke calls, a slightly whiny tone Wedge has only ever heard him use with her, like a brother calling out to a sister. She looks up from her conversation with her contact, a glass of wine in hand. Wedge will never get over her ability to make every situation she’s in feel like art, as though every monstrously weird moment of this Rebellion is somehow planned, like performance art. 

“Leia, we’ve gotta get out of here. This place gets salt storms, real bad ones, too. They could trap us in our base for years, and there’s one heading our way right now.” Leia stands abruptly. 

“That storm’s the least of our problems —“ Solo cuts in, pulling his blaster out of its holster—“this guy lured us here to sell us out to some stormtroopers.”

“And he faked environmental reports!” Luke says quickly, obviously realising just a second too late that forged environmental reports would be the last item on anybody’s priority list after Solo’s revelation. 

“C’mon Princess, we gotta go,” the captain says, pulling her by her arm away from her contact. 

Behind them, confirmation that they had indeed been sold out levels out along the line of the horizon. Four Ties and one troop carrier. A small landing party, at most twenty troopers, Wedge estimates, but not small enough to declare victory yet. 

“Luke, get back to the ships and get on the comms, get the rest of the squad down here, I’ll pull them away to give you clearance,” Wedge instructs, jumping into his speeder. 

“Copy that, commander.” Luke’s speeder peels away, dust trail temporarily obscuring Wedge’s vision. 

Over the comm:

“We’re getting you to the Falcon where you’ll be safe, Leia.”

“I don’t care about me!” The Princess bites back, her speeder whirring to life. 

“Yeah, I know, that’s why the rest of us have to. Lieutenant Antilles, can you handle this first wave? Just until we get Leia to the ship?”

“Should be fine, Captain. Might be better if you can get in the Falcon and take out those Ties for me, but so long as we don’t end up on the ground this should be a breeze.”

“I like the optimism, Lieutenant. May the Force be with you.” And he speeds off to catch up with the Princess, leaving Wedge, Chewbacca, to face down the stormtrooper platoon. 

Wedge susses out the situation on his approach. The Ties don’t seem united in their strategy yet, they’re doing circles trying to figure out which of the many moving parts they need to focus on in. As long as they’re preoccupied with the contingent heading back to the landing site the troop carrier is wide open and unprotected. If Wedge can get in close and sink that troop carrier, he can start picking the stormtroopers off before they become a surface-to-air problem. 

He explains his plan to Chewbacca, who roars back in Shyriiwook — a language Wedge unfortunately does not have in his arsenal — and ramps up his speed, angling his speeder to a collision course with the Imperial transport. 

The weapons on the Lambda class T-4a shuttles are good, but slow to heat up. Though the real weakness of the transport lay in its trihedral foil silhouette, once the fouls are all vertical in preparation for landing, the ship can remain stable with one or two foils missing. If Wedge can nail just one of the foils while they‘re still out in flight position, he can destabilise the whole thing, sending the ship rocking in the wrong direction, and hopefully hurtling towards the ground. 

He draws nearer to the incoming Imps, engaging the speeder’s meagre weapons system and praying to every god he has never believed in that this thing will have the firepower to rip a foil off the transport. 

He gets his answer sooner than he was anticipating: the transport opens fire on him and he reels his guns into position, wailing on the trigger. 

The starboard foil does, in fact, peel away from the body of the shuttle with a horrendously loud screech. It falls to the surface below, and the shuttle begins to shudder, threatening to circle wildly unless it’s grounded. 

The Imperial pilots are exactly as conservative as they were trained to be back in Wedge’s days at Skystrike, and they land the shuttle almost immediately. Step one complete. Now to shoot some fish in a barrel. 

Picking them off is about as easy as he expected. The thing about most Stormtroopers is that they’re not terribly strategically-minded, and when faced with certain death, their ability to make smart choices goes straight out the window. 

At first, they come down the ramp in a neat stream, given Wedge plenty of time to circle back repeatedly to take more potshots. When it’s become eminently clear that his sharpshooting isn’t going to taper off anytime soon, their debarking becomes more erratic. He needs to make some minor adjustments to his circling time, but he can still keep going smoothly. 

“Wedge, my ski is all fucked up, I’ve gotta drop to the ground.”

He hadn’t even realised Luke had arrived onto the battlefield, and he mentally scolds himself for letting his awareness lapse. 

“Copy that, Luke, I’ll give you cover.” He whirls his ski speeder around to fend off incoming attacks as Luke drops out of his own speeder, lightsaber ignited. Once he’s certain the playing field has been levelled enough that Luke can fend for himself, he returns to his strafing runs. 

On his fifth return to the transport, his speeder is rocked by the force of his bottom stabilising foil being blown off. His heart sinks. He’s going to have to land and fight this out hand-to-hand. The odds have abruptly changed and they are no longer in his favour. 

He speeds up as he goes in for his crash landing, bailing from the cockpit as soon as he’s certain the speeder’s on the correct trajectory for sufficient damage on impact. 

He tumbles to the ground, tucking his head into his chest just like he was taught, before jumping to his feet and unholstering his blaster. 

Chewbacca still does laps above his head, firing off rapid, clean shots at the stormtroopers. 

Now that he’s on the ground, he realises there are more than he expected. At least forty, if not more. The Empire really, really wanted to tip the scales here. 

Luke is cutting through them easily, but he’s at least a hundred metres away from him, separated by a fair few stormtroopers. 

Somewhere well above him, the sound of another ship’s engine whirs. He doesn’t risk looking up, just hopes that it’s the Falcon and squeezes off five quick shots in the direction of the nearest bucket head. 

When he finally does look up, he is greeted by bad, bad news. 

It’s not the Falcon, but another T-4a shuttle, coming in for a quick landing just a hundred metres from him. Heart pounding in his ears, he looks around desperately for any sign of the Falcon. Chewbacca continues to do laps, but there’s only so much he can do in the rusty wagon he’s piloting. 

With no sign of incoming aid, Wedge moves to his contingency plan, looking for shelter where he can dig in until help arrives. But of course, there is none, this is a perfectly flat battlefield and the only potential debris is his burned up speeder, which sits halfway inside the first troop transport. He swears loudly. 

He dives to avoid incoming blaster fire, popping off several more shots when he hits the ground. He drags himself along on his elbows for a few seconds until he’s sure the fire has subsided long enough for him to pull himself to his feet. 

Luke has closed the gap between them by several hundred feet. He looks too perfect for this world, like something only a god could conjure. His sandy brown hair whips in the wind as he practically dances his way through plasma blasts and stormtroopers and the blood red dust. 

Luke Skywalker is a miracle unto himself, and Wedge can’t tear his eyes away. 

And then time slows down. 

He has made a rookie mistake, he’s stopped moving for too long, hasn’t checked his surroundings. But, he rationalises, he was never trained as a foot soldier. 

When the butt of the blaster collides with the back of his head, he can hear Luke calling his name. 

He falls, head smacking against the ground with a worrying crack. All he sees before he loses vision is the outline of a stormtrooper boot winding up, before it makes contact with his nose, sending him spiralling into oblivion.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Crait](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Crait)
> 
> [V-4X-D ski speeders](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/V-4X-D_ski_speeder)
> 
> [Mos Espa](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mos_Espa/Legends)
> 
> [Lambda-class T-4a shuttle](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lambda-class_T-4a_shuttle/Legends)
> 
> The whole Crait set-up here was lifted directly from The Storms of Crait comic, which you can read [here](https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Star-Wars-Episode-VIII-The-Last-Jedi-Storms-of-Crait?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=7018cbc486a6af438af7be5109ba9f9f37b8838a-1582135632-0-Ad7nd4OecUFWGmoud_TzFQyZPnaZ-bzOKEHg36yypzrPzwhXw7NYOGkaMvPJNPQbIPkdVXdwCp_MnJF8QzjKEDjBuhounCZAUwa6aCv2xcHKMC0sSzwOXl4iUknavdvXOgJqA6s1p2CKMyy7HXHa42v4SG1c-UJ69a7TgI0_GIJ44VY7OHpEtkfMyXxJfdHi75k09hV2aKiYvqIaTqKkdf1EzrgLgSphvI0rTFQkvMwseVBSrSQZt9cjTcxbeAT1omPtTDyf5bFTtbVnbxb2tiZJ7ovWBWTCVzg96UCQ-6alRHfI2mUdhEvJqxBwLOpOxOJZaN2fPOXVAkSlEp_JPY7wDBYJTxCNr5JeAyW8d33N)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man I am so sorry for how long this took. Grad school apps and my dissertation buried me under a mountain of bullshit so this really fell by the wayside. Got into grad school and most of my coursework is done, though, so I’m finally able to return to this!!

Jyn knows something is terribly, terribly wrong before she even gets verbal confirmation. 

The air around her is tense with other people’s stressed focus, yes, but there’s also an unnatural tremor in it, like the normal vibrations have been slightly mis-calibrated. 

Her hand flies to her necklace. 

She hadn’t been the one to present Crait as viable, that much was certain. Even if she knew she hadn’t, there was also a written record to back her up: she hadn’t even opened the Crait file in day, it had conjured such a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach she’d shoved the datapad to the bottom of the stack and left it to collect dust. So inasmuch as culpability for this mess was an issue, she was protected. 

“General Organa, have you got any news for us?” General Hera Syndulla, the Twi’lek hero of the Battle of Lothal, asks. She is not often on base, but is called in whenever General Organa is called off. 

“Only bad news,” Jyn’s eyes flicker to Cassian, who is staring emotionlessly at the holomap in front of them, ever the incorruptible spy. “It appears we were sold out to the Empire. We were fed bad intel on Crait to get us out here, and then ambushed by two small battalions of stormtroopers.” 

Syndulla takes a deep breath, her leku twitching anxiously. 

“Any casualties?”

“Thankfully, no death. But Lieutenant Antilles of Red Squadron has been taken captive, and we may have had one defection. But I’d really rather explain this in person where the risk of interception is lessened. We’re three hours out from Echo Base now.”

Jyn’s heart splits in two. She thinks about all of the times he has been in her position, all of the times he has been the one to hear of losses. She thinks about how deeply it cuts him, and how hard he works to leave no one behind. She thinks about him, exhausted and vulnerable on the cold floor of her refresher, his heart so full with love and loss and hope and sorrow that it was eating him alive. 

“Copy that. See you soon, General, may the Force be with you.” The comm-link flickers away, and Jyn’s body feels very, very heavy. She braces herself on the chair behind her, feeling her knees go weak. 

She looks to Cassian. He looks as calm as ever. Panic surges through her veins. 

Maybe it’s the surge of adrenaline, or maybe it’s a moment of unadulterated clarity, but she knows what she has to do. 

He nods towards the doorway. She obliges him. 

“We have to go get Wedge,” she explodes once the door has shut behind them. “We have to. He’s the one that got us off Scarif, we can’t leave him behind. We’ll have to wait until Bodhi gets back and then we can commandeer a shuttle. Maybe we can convince Luke to come with us. They won’t move him to a prison planet just yet, once they figure out who he is — if they haven’t already — they’ll know he’s too valuable a target to relegate to breaking rocks. They’ll probably torture him for information, and then use him as a bargaining chip. The best we can hope for is that we can get to him before the torture scrambles his brains too badly.”

Cassian grabs her hand. She doesn’t pull back. This feels right. 

“Jyn, slow down, slow down. Yes, we can pitch a rescue mission once they’ve returned, I can’t see why anyone would say no.” It’s like she’s been winded. 

“What? Pitch one? No we have to go now, I’m still a marked name, they’ll never trust me so we just have to do it.” He squeezes her hand and she almost flinches. Almost. 

“Jyn. There was a defector. That means your name is almost certainly cleared.” A new sadness swells in Jyn. 

So that’s why he’s talking to her now. She shakes her hand loose. 

It’s time for her to recognise that they’re not really on the same page anymore, no longer speaking their own private language. 

She’s going to need to box him out. She slipped up in telling him her plan, and she’s going to need to backtrack. If she acquiesces to what he wants, he might be suspicious of her. She’ll have to be emotionally receptive to him, make him think she still thinks they’re on the same time. That might be enough to disarm him, keep his head spinning until Bodhi gets back. 

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. It’ll be fine. I’ll wait, it’s okay.” She looks down at his boots, then back up at his face through her eyelashes. A manœuvre she’s pulled for too many times relative to her age. 

She slows her breathing, reaching up to tangle a hand in his hair, the other resting on his chest. She closes her eyes and pulls him down into a kiss. 

She swears she can hear her heart shatter. 

His lips part easily against hers, and when he puts his hand to her cheek it’s all she can do not to cry. 

It’s overwhelming. He’s overwhelming. Her heartbeat speeds up, and the anxiety crashes over her. If she keeps standing her kissing him, she’s going to do something stupid, like listen to him. 

She steps back, straightens herself out, tries to think of something to say to him, an excuse to leave. 

She can’t think of anything, her brain screeches to a halt, so she leaves. Her shoulder brushes against his, and she wants to grab him, hold him close to her. But she can’t, so she doesn’t, just marches away in the direction of the dormitories feeling like there’s no oxygen left in her lungs. 

•°

When the cavalry returns from Crait, there’s a dizzying flurry of action in the hangar bay. Narra is whisked away almost immediately alongside General Organa to provide a debrief, and to explain how Red Squadron so easily let their second in command slip into the enemy’s hands. 

Luke Skywalker, usually as gentle and lovely as a Naboo spring breeze, looks like a ghost. He walks with heavy footsteps away from his ship, dodging the outstretched arms and overeager eyes of his squad mates and his golden protocol droid. When he passes by her, Jyn is overwhelmed by the weight of the shock and loss emanating off of him. It’s almost too much to bear. 

She hopes she never loves anybody that much. 

When Bodhi drops to the ground from the cockpit of his x-wing, his eyes are wide and his breathing is shallow. 

“Jyn we have to —“ Before he can get more out, she wordlessly takes his arm, pulling him from the chaos of the hangar bay. His hand trembles ever so slightly inside hers. The panic rolls off of him in brutal, unforgiving waves. 

The door to his and Luke’s quarters slides shut behind her, and the room is already too quiet for her liking. Bodhi sits nervously in his desk chair, worrying his fingernails bloody. Baze stands sentinel next to Bodhi’s cot, and Chirrut sits with impeccable serenity on the foot of that cot. It’s everybody she could think to trust, everybody she knew would trust her. 

“Bodhi, what happened?” She pleads, perhaps too much of a telltale whine in her voice.

“I–I don’t know. I really don’t. One minute we were conducting atmospheric tests on the far side of the planet and the next our comm-links were totally blacked out. I only knew to get back here because me and Hobbie had tethered our astromechs and they were able to communicate and he jumped too and—“ he pauses, takes a steadying breath, “I didn’t even realise the Empire had the technology to force blackouts like that, I mean…” He trails off, scratching the nape of his neck nervously. 

“The Empire doesn’t have that technology,” Baze affirms. Bodhi looks from Baze to Jyn, confusion flaring behind his eyes. 

“There was a defector from Red Squad, Bodhi. Cassian thinks whoever it was is the mole.” Shock, sadness, then upset flash across Bodhi’s face in record time. 

“Where is Cassian?” 

“He, uh,” Jyn fumbles for words, “he and I had a difference in opinion, so he’s not… he won’t be…” 

“Their emotions are getting in the way of the clear route forward,” Chirrut declares, with far too much certainty for Jyn’s liking. She bites back her rude retort, glancing up at the chrono on the wall to recentre herself, and then looks back to Bodhi. 

“Never mind the mole, we have to go get Wedge,” Jyn announces, more confidence present in her voice than there’s been in weeks. “We’re going to need to figure out where they’ve taken him, but I think I should be able to do that easily enough if I can get into the intelligence comms centre. Then, we’ll need to get out of here — commandeer a ship and go. If my suspension is correct that they’re going to hold him on a Star Destroyer, we’ll need to be clever about it. Infiltrating them isn’t impossible, but it certainly isn’t easy either.” She pauses, organising her thoughts. 

“Bodhi, do you think Luke will be open to coming along? I don’t know him well enough to judge his willingness to take part in minor mutinies.” Bodhi doesn’t respond for a long minute, looking dazed and so very, very tired. 

“Yeah, uh, yeah. He probably will. I can ask him, I can ask him while you break into intelligence command.” 

“There’s no need to break into anywhere,” the sound of the door sliding open behind her startles her, but not nearly as much as the realisation of who exactly has just walked through it. “He’s onboard the Relentless, which according to our reports was most recently stationed above D’Qar,” Cassian continues, stepping into the room as comfortably as if he’d been invited in the first place. 

Jyn has no idea how to respond, no idea how to process this, so she lets him carry on. 

“I’ve spoken to General Syndulla, who is technically still acting commander of Echo Base and who is much more receptive to these sorts of missions than other commanders on base. We can take one of the impounded T-4as, as long as we go within the next hour.” 

Jyn can only stare at him. 

By now, she thinks she should be used to him surprising her, should have known from the moment he rallied the rebels on Yavin that he was unlike anything she’d ever dealt with before. 

His eyes flicker to meet hers, and then away again. Jyn’s stomach ties itself in precious guilty knots. 

“We fly under the Rogue One callsign. We need to go. Now.”

She brushes aside the tidal wave of emotions that’s speeding towards her worn-out psychological walls. Sh clears her throat. “Right. Let’s gather what we need and meet on the shuttle in an hour.” 

•°

Cassian hasn’t so much as looked at her in hours. The tension had been so immense she’d stalked out of the crew hold to the cockpit not a half an hour after they’d left Hoth’s atmosphere. 

Bodhi and Luke sit in the cockpit, each much quieter than normal, looking uncharacteristically shellshocked for two young troops who had seen so much. 

“Where’s your necklace from?” Luke asks her as she perches on the armrest of Bodhi’s seat. Instinctively, she reaches up to it, feeling the cold, smooth exterior of the kyber crystal underneath the canvas of her stolen Imperial fatigues.

“My parents gave it to me when I was a child on Lah’mu. It was a family heirloom from my mum’s family, I think once she told me it’s from a desert planet, but I’m not sure I remember that correctly.” Luke hums. 

Jyn wonders what he knows about her crystal. More than her? Chirrut had told her the history of the kyber crystals, that they were used by the Jedi to power their swords, that when they made a connection with a crystal it’s chemical composition would change, giving it a new colour and imbuing it with special powers. Her crystal is white, translucent at the edges like clean ice. Or stardust. 

“Any chance of communication with Echo Base?” Cassian queries from behind her, and she tenses. She hadn’t heard his footsteps. 

“For a little while longer, yeah. What do you need?” Bodhi responds. 

“I want to know who the deserter is, that might help us know what to expect when we get on board.” 

Bodhi taps out a binary code transmission. A simple request beamed through the brilliant tangle of stars and planets and darkness: who didn’t return? 

They all sit in the silence for far too long. Outside, the lines of the stars all seem to melt together. 

As a kid, just after she’d been taken away from Lah’mu, just after she’d lost her parents for the first time, Saw had told her the story of an ancient pilot who had stared too long at the star lines. The light had warped his brain, untying knots made by thousands of years of evolution, driving him mad. The pilot, who had once been kind and generous, suddenly became cruel and barbaric, driven insane by the light of hyperspace. He had murdered his crew and then himself, making a ghost ship of his once-prized star yacht. 

(When Saw had told her, she asked how anybody could know the story if there were no survivors. Saw hadn’t answered.) 

The dashboard in front of Bodhi flashes, and Jyn tears her eyes away from the stars, the memory fading into the blackness of space. 

“What did they say?” Cassian asks brusquely. 

Bodhi looks at Luke, a mixture of sadness and fear on his face. 

“Red six.”

•°

“You fools! I told you to get the Jedi! The one with the bright blue laser sword! How could you have missed him?” 

Wedge becomes aware that his arms are in agony before he becomes aware that he is awake. 

His biceps hang above his head, low enough that he could almost rest his arms on his head, but high enough that he can’t. The pull of gravity is doing its damage: when his hand twitches, he can feel where the cuffs are cutting into his wrists. 

The lights that shine through his closed eyelids flicker. 

He hazards opening one eye. 

Then the other. 

He’s in a prison cell, the standard shape and layout of the brig on Star Destroyers. He breathes deeply and slowly, willing away the adrenaline spike. 

If he’s right, then his luck is even worse than he realised and he’s been knocked out for far too long. His head stings. If he’d lost consciousness long enough to stay cold for the entire extraction process, then he’s probably very, very concussed. That’s a much worse scenario than he could’ve hoped for.

“Does he look like a Jedi to you?” 

•°

So, this is who her tormentor is. If Cassian is right, that is, and the defector is also the mole. 

It’s funny, for all the pain that the mole has caused her, for all the unwarranted isolation and suffering, she doesn’t feel very much at all towards Shira Brie. 

Neither anger nor resentment, nor anything in between. Just numbness, maybe a small feeling of bitter irony: if she’d gotten her way on Kijimi and they’d just evacuated after she’d been shot, Shira never would’ve set foot on base. Her gut instinct, it seems, had been more correct than she could’ve ever guessed when she’d laid bloody and beaten on the corrugated flooring of that landing ramp. 

She can feel Cassian’s eyes on her, burning like plasma. 

•°

“Lieutenant Wedge Antilles, twenty-one years of age, hailing from Coronet City, Corellia. Skystrike Academy drop-out.”

“Defector,” Wedge corrects. The gray-clad Imp before him quirks an eyebrow, then returns her gaze to the datapad in his hand. “Currently attached to the Rebel Alliance’s Red Squadron.” 

Wedge’s heart sinks. They’ll know the location of Echo Base now. 

•°

They coalesce in the cargo hold of the transport. She’s done this all before, it all feels unnervingly familiar. 

“We don’t get to just blast our way through this time,” she begins, voice awkwardly formal considering the group of people she’s speaking to. “We’re going to have to sneak our way in, if you’ve ever wanted to be an actor, this is your moment.” No one laughs. Jyn’s not sure she even wants them to. 

“Right now, Bodhi and Luke are bringing us in to — hopefully — the Relentless’ main hangar. When they’re done with that, Bodhi’s going to come brief us on the layout of the ImpDeuces. Chirrut, Baze, you’re going to need to deactivate the ship’s tractor beam. Luke and Bodhi are going to track down Wedge. Cassian and I will deal with the defector.” 

Chirrut’s eyebrows furrow. He had once told her that the Force moves darkly around those about to kill. 

She suspects the Force must be black around her. 

•°

Luke Skywalker has never had much of an opportunity to be scared. On Tatooine, there wasn’t very much to be scared of, save Uncle Owen’s morning grumpiness. And then after Tatooine everything had happened so quickly that by the time an emotion vaguely resembling fear showed up, the adrenaline from _ yet another  _ disaster superseded it. And besides, none of the people around him ever seem to show fear; Leia is always too clever, too put together to seem rattled by the things falling apart around them, and Han is too cool to even  _ have _ emotions. 

Right now, Luke Skywalker is scared.

He’s  _ very _ scared. 

It’s not like he feels protective of Wedge, not as such. But there’s this horrible, wrenching pain in his chest that feels like metal grinding against metal, a feeling he knows will only go away once he gets to Wedge again. 

He fidgets with his lightsaber as Bodhi runs all the necessary checks and procedures to bring them into the ImpDeuce’s landing bay. He wonders what Leia would have to say about this, about what Han  _ will _ say when he and Chewie get back from their supply run. Not that it really matters now, there’s a horrible voice at the back of his mind telling him he’s never going to leave this starship.

“Time to go,” Baze says, placing his hand gingerly on Luke’s shoulder. Some of the panic subsides at his touch, and Luke nods, shoving its lightsaber back into its holster. He shimmies down the ladder into the hole where Jyn, Cassian, and Chirrut stand, strapping up their gear. 

Jyn and Cassian move together like dancers on a stage, so effortlessly he swears he can almost see the motion blur. He has seen a lot of love amongst the rebels — more than he’d ever seen on Tatooine — but none like this, communicates almost entirely in gestures and glances, seeming as though there were a gentle white light surrounding them. 

He thinks of Wedge, and a chill falls over him. Theirs is not like Jyn and Cassian’s, it is unwieldy and dangerous, bringing greater risks with every passing second. 

Luke stands in front of the ramp as it lowers, watching the shiny black expanse of the landing dock floor spread out before him. He senses Bodhi behind him, and he steps forward into the brilliant white light. 


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry y’all — this pandemic has fully beat me down. On the bright side I got into all the grad programmes I applied to!

The first thing she notices is the smell. Antiseptic in the extreme, like a cleaning droid exploded, spilling its guts to the deck around them. It’s a smell she hasn’t smelled in a long time, not since she was a child on Lokori. Whoever is running this destroyer is running it well: the almost unattainable Imperial standards of cleanliness are as much about, well, cleanliness as they are about overwhelming a being’s senses, about making the hierarchy of discipline and control unmistakable. The rest of the Galaxy could be riddled with filth, but the Empire’s installations were scrubbed with bleach once a rotation. The cleaning agents, stripping away the disorder of dirt and grime, were strong, but in relative terms they did not matter: what mattered was the cleaning droid that did the scrubbing, or the military grunt or prisoner of war who rubbed their digits raw on scouring pads and bleach, each moment reminded that there was an order to the world.

Most people, even most Imperials, would never notice the unsettlingly clean facade of the Empire, but Jyn has been conditioned to notice it. It’s why as she watches the Relentless’ deck officer return to the office he skittered out from, she realises that this is going to be a lot more difficult than she’d planned for. 

She nods to Luke and Bodhi as they pass her by, ushering Baze and Chirrut (dressed, much to both their chagrin, as subcontracted engineers) towards the nearest corridor sprouting off from the hangar bay like a complex root system. 

“What do you think?” Cassian asks her, his voice startlingly low. 

“It’s not going to be easy,” she begins, and he raises an eyebrow at her, “no, I’m serious, I don’t think we planned for how hard this is going to be. Whoever’s commanding this destroyer is meticulous.” Cassian looks around him, as if to confirm what she’s said, before nodding. 

“We find the nearest terminal and figure out where she is,” Cassian says, eyes still scanning the hangar. 

“There,” she says after a few moments searching silence. Just inside the blast door the others have passed through sits a small terminal, significantly placed enough that it should have access to the information they need, but offset enough from the hangar that nobody should stop to ask questions. She makes for it. 

“I never suspected you of anything, Jyn.” Cassian says, placing himself between her and the terminal and the exit to the hangar. 

“But that’s not enough for me right now. I don’t need you to just not be against me, I need you to  be with me.” He doesn’t say anything. “I don’t think you know how hard this is for me. Not only have I lost everything I didn’t even know I had, but for the first time in my life I’m trying to do the right thing and now it feels like I’m more alone than I’ve ever been before, like all anybody cares about is that I’m the daughter of the man who destroyed Alderaan.” Her voices catches, and she starts to count backwards from five, pulling a computer spike from where it was tucked inside her cap. 

“I’m not asking to be thanked or celebrated or deified for what we did, I don’t even need or want them to know my name, but when you keep saying ‘welcome home’ or that I’m one of you guys now, but when I still feel totally alienated, I just, I don’t know what to make of it.” 

She slots the computer spike into the terminal, breathing deeply as it whirls into place. The information she’s seeking flashes across the terminal screen. “She’s in officer’s row, deck sixty-five.” She hurries after Cassian as he moves to the turbo lifts.

“And when I’m waking up breathless most nights feeling like I’m not supposed to be here — like we weren’t supposed to make it — and then I don’t even know where we stand?” She jabs the button for the sixty-fifth deck in the turbolift, sighing as the doors close in front of them. “You make my head spin and when it’s just the two of us—“ she gestures into the empty space between them, “— it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before and I don’t even know how to articulate it, but it’s the only thing that makes me feel like I’m actually a part of something better—“ the turbolift beeps at floor forty-three and the doors fall open. 

Jyn slams her mouth shut, shuffling away from Cassian as a harried-looking colonel enters. He looks between them and laughs. 

“Oh dear, having a bit of a domestic are we?” Jyn forces a titter. 

“Squadron growing pains,” she replies, averting her eyes as quickly as she can. 

“Happens to the best of us,” he says, straightening out the cuffs of his uniform. Even though he’s about the same size and build as Cassian, he seems to take up infinitely more space, as though the galaxy itself should bend itself to his needs. The physical arrogance, Jyn thinks, that only a thoroughbred Imperial could have. 

The silence is painful, and Jyn counts each number with care as it passes by the monitor screen of the turbolift. Her mind is racing, like someone has shaken it until her brain has decomposed to mere audio vibrations. Finally, when it feels like her brain is going to leak out her ears, the doors open at floor sixty-five. 

“And when I don’t know where I stand in all this—” she waves her hand in front of her once the turbolift doors (at long last) shut behind them, “—in the whole galaxy, really, then it just doesn’t help me when I don’t know where we stand. And it feels to me like this, like  us, whatever that means, might be the most important thing in the galaxy to me right now but that we can’t have  us—“  she sidles up to yet another terminal, inserting a computer spike and searching for Shira’s name on the list of names who have passed through the doors on this deck in the past half-hour, “— if the galaxy is falling apart around us.” She takes a breath, making a note of the last room Shira had entered. “Looks like she’s in an officer’s quarters of some kind, doesn’t look like anyone else is with her.”

“Which way?” Cassian asks, wholly unfazed by Jyn’s sudden change in timbre. Jyn nods towards the corridor running perpendicular to the terminal. 

“You and I work well, together, dangerously well. And I think that that means that you and I can have a hand in making this galaxy a better place. But to do that you have to trust me, and not just in the abstract way that we all trust each other, but I need you to seriously trust me and communicate with me. And that means when I say that something doesn’t sit right with me like on Kijimi, that you hear me out and treat my instincts with the respect that I should think you would have for them by now.” She pauses outside of a door, cocking her head towards it. Cassian nods. 

She presses the alert button next to the door lock while he unholsters his blaster. The ringing behind the door lasts only a few seconds. Jyn considers it a show of trust for her that Cassian shoots first and verifies later. 

•°

“This way,” Bodhi says, pressing into Luke to guide him, “then down ten floors.” Behind them, Baze and Chirrut amble along. Luke’s training is insignificant (just a few short hours at best), but even with what little honing he has, he can still feel Chirrut’s strong force signature tugging at the air around them. 

Luke’s heart is thumping and his stomach is doing flips. He can barely think clearly for how frequently his mind wanders to Wedge, filling him with dread and panic. 

It’s the sort of emotional rush he’s still not used to, still hasn’t taught himself how to manage yet. It’s so different to the adrenaline rushes he gets when he’s burning sky, where he feels like anything’s possible and he’s  totally in control. Now, he just feels like anything’s possible and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. He longs for Ben back, to ground him, to show him his place in all this. 

Instead of his mentor’s grounding presence, he is instead forced to the left by Bodhi, who, while less confident than Luke in most things, knows his way around the standardised interior of Imperial installations better than almost anyone in the rebellion. Into the turbolift they go, and still Luke can’t think of much else besides the thrumming behind his chest. The floors tick downwards, and at some point they all exit the lift, and shuffle further down the corridor at Bodhi’s initiative. 

At last they approach the end of the corridor where two Stormtroopers with immaculate posture guard a heavy blast door. 

“State your business.” Luke has learned over the past couple of months that some situations proceed best when he doesn’t talk. 

“These are subcontractors from the Rori research facility in the Naboo system. They’ve been instructed to complete a risk assessment on the Gemon-4 ion engines for Brigadier General Nevar,” Bodhi tells them, his voice modulated through his own Stormtrooper helmet. 

“I wasn’t told about any risk assessments,” one of the Stromtroopers replies, reaching for his wrist computer. 

This, he realises, is actually one of those moments when him speaking is helpful. In a neat flourish — one that, he laments, he has practiced too much — he removes his helmet, raising a hand to the troopers. 

“You  have heard about this risk assessment,” he says, reaching out to the Force in the rudimentary method Ben had taught him. His words hang in the air for a short, tense moment. 

“I have heard about this risk assessment,” the trooper repeats, his voice dulled by acquiescence. 

“You  will let them pass.” 

“I will let them pass.” 

And so the door opens, whirring back into its vestibule to reveal the massive cavernous abyss that constitutes the engine control core of Imperial Star Destroyers. Chirrut and Baze enter first, followed by Bodhi and lastly Luke, who hovers just a moment by the Stormtrooper guards, lightly in awe of these newfangled skills of his. 

“It should look like this, wait until you hear from us, the longer it’s disabled the more time there is for the bridge to figure out something’s gone wrong,” Bodhi tells Baze, handing him a datapad.

“Let’s go,” Luke says, a strained urgency in his voice. 

They go as quickly as they can without outwardly breaking into a run, navigating the labyrinthine corridors of the destroyer not by terminal waypoint, but by Bodhi’s muscle memory. An accidental weakness of the Empire’s emphasis on standardisation was that once a foe learned the ropes for one class of Imperial ship, they were immediately capable of navigating nearly every other Imperial installation. 

“What’s our play?” Bodhi asks as they near the detention cells, it’s a question that almost — but not quite — stops Luke dead in his tracks. A plan? As far as he was aware they already had a plan: break into the Star Destroyer, rescue Wedge, and go. What more of a plan did Bodhi need? Was it not enough to merely show up, have a shoot out, and hope for the best?

Bodhi presses a hand against the metal of the blast door, as if to hold them shut. 

“Before we go in there we need a plan.”

“Right, yeah,” he goes to rub the back of his head, only to find the cold plastoid of the stolen helmet. “Okay, how about—“ before he can even begin his thought, a tremor in the Force alerts him to imminent danger. 

He grabs Bodhi’s hand the very second the blast door flies open, and it’s all Bodhi needs to snap back to Stormtrooper posture. As if materialising from thin air, an Imperial Officer — a general, by Luke’s estimation — appears in front of them.

“You two. What are you doing?” She sneers, the thin veneer of propriety barely masking the palpable stress that underpins her voice. Before either can make an attempt at an excuse, she continues. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Come with me.” 

•°

Cassian presses the nose of his blaster into Shira’s stomach, pulling the trigger and then stepping forward to catch her falling body before it hits the ground. As he steps into her quarters, dragging her by the shoulders, Jyn shuffles in, closing the door behind them. 

“Cover her up with the blanket, it’ll buy us some extra time,” Cassian says, dropping Shira onto the bed in the corner of the room. Jyn obliges, turning her lifeless body to face the wall and then pulling the covers up over her. 

“I don’t know anyone else I could have this conversation with, I think, but I need more buy-in from you. Because I don’t want to have talked the whole way through this if you and I have very different ideas of what ‘us’ is.” She takes a deep breath, crossing her arms to look at Cassian, who is crouched on the floor staring at something inside of the wardrobe.

“Looks like she was a dark Jedi of some sort,” he says, brandishing a lightsaber. Its red blade quivers, burning up the space between them. 

“Well let’s grab what we can, we’ll bring it back to base and see what can be done with it.” She puts her hands to her hips, glancing around the room. 

It’s sparse, sparse enough to be reminiscent of the austere Imperial prison camps she’d been in and out of since age sixteen. She can’t understand why anyone would willingly  choose this life. 

“Jyn.” She shakes herself from her reverie and turns to look at him. “We need to get out of here.”

•°

It takes Luke no time at all to realise that the arrival of this Imperial officer may have been a blessing in disguise. She’s leading them, for reasons likely known only to the Force and the Force alone, deeper into the detention blocks. 

Not two metres ahead of them, a detention guard of unidentifiable rank leans against the wall, his nose and lip bloodied, the side of his face beginning to swell. “Lieutenant Shieldaig, you are relieved of your duties, report to the medbay for treatment,” the general says to the man. For his part, he seems frightened by her appearance, and scuttles away practically before she is done speaking. She watches his retreating form, her face disfigured by a look of disgust suited at best to a tatoo-rat, and not another person. 

“This particular prisoner has caused some… trouble… for our venerable guards. I need you to wait inside the cell and prevent him from doing any more harm until the next guard detachment is prepared. You may subdue the prisoner by any means necessary.” As she speaks, she begins to key in a code on the cell’s locking mechanism. Once it opens, Bodhi descends into the cell. Luke follows with no intervention necessary. The door slams shut behind it, the complex locking systembuzzing up a storm behind them. 

Luke’s heart leaps. He’s there, in the corner of the barren cell, looking bloodied, exhausted, but defiant, still clothed in his orange flightsuit. 

“Wedge!” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Lokori](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lokori?mobile-app=false)
> 
> [Gemon-4 ion engines](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Gemon-4_ion_engine%2FLegends?mobile-app=false)
> 
> [Brig. Gen. Nevar](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Nevar%2FLegends?mobile-app=false)


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for disappearing for seven months — i moved countries, started a postgrad degree, and you may have heard of this pandemic? lol. anyways im back to this now hopefully xx

“We need to blow it,” she says before Cassian gets to the door. “We can’t trust that they haven’t initiated contact with the rest of the fleet — or that they haven’t sent out a scouting mission to confirm our base location. We need this whole thing gone.” Cassian doesn’t blink.

“Can you do it?”

Cruisers? Sure. She and Saw had blown plenty of them back in the day, and what were they really but scaled-down Destroyers? She tells Cassian she can with far more confidence than she’s probably earned, but right now she really doesn’t need him second guessing her. 

It’s like slipping into a trance, going back to the routines and procedures she learned and perfected with Saw. Cassian follows her and for now, that’s all she needs. 

•°

Luke pulls his lightsaber from its holster, cutting through the binders that hold Wedge’s arms above his head. He looks bad, real bad. There’s a smear of blood on his face, maybe originating at his nose, maybe his mouth, maybe from his hairline, all Luke knows for certain is that there’s so much of it, too much. 

Wedge stumbles forward, and Luke catches him.

“Easy there, I got you,” he whispers, steadying him. 

“We were betrayed,” he says, his voice not yet raspy, but not full, either. 

“We know,” Luke says, wiping a blood-matted clump of hair from Wedge’s forehead. “But right now we gotta get you outta here. Jyn and Cassian will handle the rest.” 

“We should — we should go now,” Bodhi says, worry permeating his voice. 

“How are we getting out of here?” Wedge asks while Luke pulls his repeating blaster out of its holster and pressing it to Wedge.

“We’ll figure that out as we go,” Luke says, and Bodhi reaches for his comm. “Jyn — we’ve got him.”

“Copy that, Bodhi,” Cassian’s voice returns, always so composed. “Get back to the shuttle and get it ready to get us out of here.” Bodhi looks to Luke. Luke looks to Wedge. 

“Sounds like those binders are going back on.” Wedge quirks an eyebrow and Luke laughs, grateful that despite his appearance, his spirits remain unchanged. 

So Luke haphazardly welds the binders back together with his lightsaber, and Bodhi pushes open the door release, and they’re out. 

They don’t have to go far. Down the corridor, into the turbolift, down fifteen levels, and into the hangar bay. It’s all going alarmingly well, so well that he leans in to Wedge and whispers, “smoothest rescue mission I’ve ever done.” Wedge doesn’t say anything, presses his lips together until they form a tight line. 

He’s trying not to get too smug about it, but it really is. To be fair, the last rescue mission he completed was rescuing Leia and that culminated in the destruction of the Death Star, so it’s not as though the last mission was unsuccessful, but there certainly was a lot more blaster fire. 

The shuttle is still wide open, and he and Bodhi jerk Wedge up the ramp, trying to maintain at least the facade of Imperial brutality. 

When they’re safely inside, Luke cuts the binders off again and forces Wedge into a seat, leaving Bodhi to start the pre-flight checks. He sinks to his knees in front of Wedge, looking at him clearly for the first time in what feels like his whole life. 

His heart is so full, it’s too much, he can’t keep his emotions in check. It feels like all this love is going to burst through his chest if he doesn’t do something about it right now. He clutches Wedge’s face, as softly, as gently as he can, and brings them together. 

•°

It’s all so easy. It shouldn’t be this easy, it’s setting off alarm bells in her brain as they skirt around the perimeter of the destroyer, circling ever closer to the reactor core. 

They have to be quick about it, get in, slice the computer, introduce the negative feedback loop programme, and get the fuck out before anybody sees them. She can do this. 

They subdue the guards outside the entrance, rolling their bodies into the heart of the core before Cassian returns to the corridor to keep watch. It takes no more than five minutes, and then that’s it. They’re running back out to the hangar bay as if they were never there at all. 

There’s a scuffle on the loading dock, an ISB officer notices them running and they exchange fire. Luke, brilliant golden boy that he is, makes it out of the shuttle in time to take a blaster bolt to the back that was headed for Jyn’s head. They drag him up the shuttle ramp, laying him out as Bodhi throttles them all out of there. 

Even with Luke laid out unconscious in the back, it was still too easy. If this is all it took to take down an entire destroyer, the war would have been won by now and could have been won with half the strength the Alliance had currently amassed. 

It’s not until Bodhi’s careening them away from the explosion ripping through the Destroyer that Jyn even thinks to mention her concerns. When she does, Cassian just looks at her, lips pressed tightly. Jyn doesn’t need to hear him say it: he’s worried too. 

•°

As the darkness begins to overtake him, he sees a familiar figure, one he has longed to see for months. 

“Luke,” Ben’s voice rings out. “You will go to the Dagobah system. There you will learn from Yoda, the Jedi Master who trained me—," the world around him quakes, and Ben is gone. Someone somewhere yells, it may have even been him. 

The darkness claims him. 

When he wakes, there’s a fantastic pain in his head, like something’s burrowed its way into his brain and is now trying to crawl its way out from the inside. 

“You’ll be okay, young one,” a quiet voice says from beside him, and Luke racks his brain to place it. 

“Ben?” he rasps, and he feels a calloused hand clasp his. 

“Rest more,” the voice says again. 

He does.

  
  


•°

“Some rescue mission,” Wedge says glumly, dropping into the fold-down seat beside her. Jyn hums, running a microfiber rag over the stock of her blaster rifle. It’s futile, she’s only smearing the hull grease around it further, but it’s almost meditative. 

“I’ll remember that and just leave you next time,” she says, but there’s no bite to her tone. 

Wedge huffs out a laugh. “Bodhi says you led the crusade to get this mission off the ground.”

“Cassian got the shuttle and the approval.”

“Do you ever take credit for what you accomplish?” She looks up at him. He’s still a mess, dried, crusted blood streaking his face, several gnarly bruises dotting his jawline. If this is just what’s left a Mark, he’s probably in a world of pain. 

“You look like shit,” she says, reaching up to touch split skin along his hairline. He doesn’t flinch. 

“I’ve heard worse things from prettier girls,” he says, tone playful. She probably believes him, but doesn't press the issue.

She rolls her eyes at him. “Take a day or two off, it’ll do you good.” She goes back to polishing her blaster, nothing left to say to him. 

Chirrut leaves his sentinel position by Luke’s side. After a few minutes where he seems to be having an intense internal debate, Wedge sinks to his knees besides Luke. Jyn looks away, looks anywhere but at the scene playing out in front of her, not wanting to steal another moment from them when they already seem to have so few. 

It’s the longest three hour flight of her life. She cleans her blaster, then cleans her backup blaster, then unlaces and re-laces her boots. At some point, Wedge pulls himself back into one of the seats, staring listlessly at the ground beneath his boots. Jyn considers talking to him again, considers asking if she can try to fix up his face a bit, but she’s too exhausted to expend the emotional energy right now, so she stays silent. 

When Luke finally comes to, she leaves the passenger hold, throwing herself into the gunnery seat and tracing the paths of the stars as they blend together. 

She’s shattered but too wired to sleep. There are so many open conversations she needs to close right now, between her and Cassian, between her and the Alliance, between her and the galaxy. The blood pumps in her head, and she wants nothing more than to silence it with a strong drink. _Or three_. 

This stupid shuttle is too open, no conversation could be private, and even though they’re built to carry at least thirty troops, it still feels like they’re all sitting on top of one another. 

Cassian is hovering around her. He’s going to great lengths to appear busy but Jyn doesn’t need to look too long to know that he’s not really doing anything at all. If she were less forgiving she might fault him for it, but she understands his emotional state entirely. He, too, has questions he needs answered. 

  
  


•°

Luke wakes like an actor on a holovid would: eyelashes fluttering open, head tilting gently, and then gazing up at him with a smile. Wedge helps him to a seated position once he’s sure there’s no real damage, and then returns to cleaning his blaster. 

“Kanan Jarrus,” Luke says slowly while Wedge smears hull grease over the carbon scoring, then begins to buff it out. “You knew him?” 

Images flash before his eyes:

_Kanan, Ezra — the last of the known Jedi — using the force to send ship parts hurtling between one another and howling with laughter when one of them missed, accidentally smacking the other with debris._

_Hera returning from Lothal, shell shocked and borderline despondent, with nobody but her droid to accompany her, the entire crew of the Ghost scattered to the galaxy like stardust expelled from a supernova._

“Yeah, I knew him.” 

“How did he die?” Wedge’s hand slips, and the rag tumbles to the ground below him.

“He, uh,” he stares at the rag, trying to decide if it’s worth the effort of bending down, decides it isn’t, and busies himself with checking all the nooks with his screwdriver. “He sacrificed himself. On Lothal. His crew were trapped by the Imperial governor there and he bought them time. They all survived because of him.” _Or_ , he mentally corrects himself, _at least they all survived until the next day because of him_. 

Luke doesn’t say anything and Wedge tries not to wonder if that’s a bad thing. 

“And Ezra Bridger?” Wedge winces involuntarily. That’s a far touchier subject than the noble Jedi destined to be brave and die nobly. Ezra was a kid when he disappeared, just as young and fresh and hopeful as Wedge had been. 

“Gone.” It sounds too optimistic, so he adjusts, “dead, probably. Another self-sacrifice — your people do that a lot, don’t they?” It comes out harsher than he’d intended, but he suspects Luke’s newly pained expression isn’t because of Wedge’s callousness. 

“They’re not my people,” Luke says meekly and, sure, Wedge has probably spent more time around Jedi than Luke ever has, but half the beings in this rebellion are relying on Luke’s tenuous connections to the ravaged order for their daily dose of hope, so — yeah, they are _his people._ He chooses not to press it; Luke had his head bashed in pretty badly and probably doesn’t need to add an identity crisis to the mix. 

“I’ll tell you what, when we get back to base I’m going to stand in the ‘fresher until it melts our entire sector.” Luke unsheathes his lightsaber, rolling his wrist to examine it from all sides. “You could join me, if you’d like,” Wedge presses, and Luke’s grasp on the hilt momentarily falters. Wedge laughs, even though the movement sends shocks of pain through his ribcage. The hero of Yavin shocked by the most mundane reference to ‘fresher sex, this truly was a brave new world. 

“We’ll be making planetfall in t-minus-five minutes,” Jyn says from somewhere behind him. Her usual clipped Coruscanti accent sounds strained, flatter, in that way he only heard when she was deeply upset or several drinks into a long night, or both. He’ll have to check up on her later, when they’re back on base and he’s gotten something for the tearing pain in his lungs. 

He turns around in time to watch her leave, her shoulders pulled uncomfortably taut and her hair more out of her usual bun than in it. She looks like a tension cable ready to snap at any moment.

He hopes he’s nowhere near when she does. 

•°

Cassian and Bodhi talk in lowered voices behind her, and she can feel the uneasiness radiating off them like a solar flare. The Rebel Alliance has only relocated once since they finally congregated on Yavin, and an evacuation of this scale needed weeks of planning, not hours. It’s so different from the life Jyn had grown accustomed to, where mobility was the highest virtue and fleeing a planet took a matter of minutes because anything not bolted to the ship could get left behind. 

It’s not that she doesn’t like Hoth, not really, it’s just that the permanence is stifling. Her anxiety is worse knowing that she has to be physically tethered to something than it ever is in the middle of a shootout, where at least she can always do a runner. She knows that it’s not the same for so much of the Rebellion, for everyone who fought so hard and sacrificed so much to get them first to Yavin, then to Hoth, but she just can’t emotionally connect to it. 

When they drop out of hyperspace over Hoth, it’s mayhem. Bodhi relinquishes control to Wedge, (who performs some of the most impressive flying she’s ever seen) to navigate them through the onslaught of what appears to be nearly the entire Imperial fleet this side of Coruscant. This is why they'd escaped so easily: the Empire had had bigger priorities than stopping a rescue mission. 

As they break through the outer atmosphere she watches in horror as one, two, three y-wings spiral out of the sky. Watching them makes her feel like she’s been corseted by beskar, just taking a breath feels like fighting an uphill battle. It’s too close to Scarif, too —

— They slam into the powdery snow several thousand metres outside Echo Base’s shield, metal screeching against the metres of compacted snow as the shuttle slows to a stop. Wedge says he’s not ready to risk the might of an anti-aircraft gunner who hadn’t registered their friendly signal, but Jyn suspects he’s just desperate to get into his x-wing and join the fight. 

Wedge, Bodhi, and Luke tear off towards the base, Luke yelling wildly into his comm as he tries to account for his squadron. There’s a horrible pull in Jyn’s chest as she watches them disappear into the base. It’s as if she’s never going to see them again. 

Cassian jumps into the pilot’s seat, and Jyn assumes her position as co-pilot, very pointedly forcing the foreboding thoughts from her mental dashboard. 

She slips the headset around her head in time to hear: “Rogue One transmitting rendezvous point coordinates now.”

“Copy that. Rogue One departing Echo Base,” Cassian says, voice steady as he keys in the coordinates. “We’re running low on fuel,” he says to her, but she barely registers it. 

She wishes she could _not_ watch the calamity unfolding before her, that she could tear her eyes away and concentrate all her attention on what’s going on inside the cockpit. But she can’t, so she watches soldier after soldier get mowed down by the AT-ATs until Cassian heaves the shuttle into the air, relegating the action on the ground to history. 

One thing they don’t warn you about when you train to go up against the Empire is the horrific, gut-wrenching noises the walkers make when they move. It’s as if the galaxy itself is rebelling against the existence of the weapons as each gigantic limb emits a high-pitched, rattling whine when it moves. It can be heard in a thousand metres in all directions, a warning when you’re on the ground in front of it that resistance, escape is futile. Through the thick metal frame of the shuttle’s hull, the sound _still_ nauseates her, cutting off the airflow into her lungs as she thinks about what that noise inevitably means for so many soldiers a thousand feet below her. 

Jyn tries not to wonder if anybody she knows died down there. It’s a dangerous impulse. 

Their escape demands more complex piloting than Cassian seems strictly comfortable with, so she stays quiet as they wait for their signal to break though the amassed Imp fleet and jump to light. 

It’s anarchy in the black, and a nagging feeling in the back of her head tells her they’re only making it through because they’re in a stolen imperial shuttle. She tries not to dwell on what that implies for everybody else trying to flee. 

When they finally burn sky, Jyn blinks, slides back in her chair, and stares at her boots. She wonders when she stopped processing battles as a major trauma, when everything started glazing over and meaning nothing. 

“How long?” Baze asks from his seat at the starboard guns. 

“With the amount of fuel we have? Two days sublight,” Cassian says, pulling Jyn back to reality.

“Two days?” she says, her voice more aggressive than she intends.

“Unless you’ve got a better way to get fuel?”

Jyn bristles. 

•°

The thing about these snowspeeders is that when they’d been requisitioned from Ando Prime, nobody had ever seriously thought they’d be needed for combat. Mostly, they’d been dragged out for resource scouting missions across Hoth, or for when the pilots of the various squadrons got bored and didn’t want to deal with the fuss of taking the x-wings out into the black. 

There are about a hundred problems with these speeders that Wedge could rattle off right now, not least of which is the complete lack of power behind the on-board artillery. Against the full might of the Empire’s invading ground force, they might as well start throwing rocks. 

On his second failed pass of the Imperial walker, he makes the mistake of surveying the battlefield. 

To call it chaos would be to understate it. 

It’s like nothing he’s ever seen, ground forces pressing forward further and further into their own obliteration, like fish jumping straight into the mouth of a yarthul. 

Ahead, the A- and Y-wing escorts for the fleeing carriers fall from the sky like rain. 

_This isn’t a raid, this is a massacre_. 

In his ear, Luke instructs Red Squadron to use their tow cables. Wes whoops behind him when the walker collapses face down into the snow, the shockwave and ensuing explosion of noise nestling deep into Wedge’s chest, shaking him, quite literally, to his core. It’s a hollow victory. 

Dak dies. 

His heart races through his head. It’s too close, it’s too difficult. These speeders are useless, not as nimble or as powerful as his x-wing, they don’t afford him enough control. He can’t protect Luke and complete his mission like this. He has to make a choice. 

More and more Imperial ships penetrate the troposphere, barraging the base with an untenable amount of firepower. Anybody unlucky enough to still be in there won’t live much longer. 

Luke crashes and the choice is made for him, ripping his heart through his chest and flinging it into the nearest sun. 

He coaches himself back into sanity as he whirls the speeder around the next walker. He needs to be emotionally stronger, there is no war without loss, and there will be no freedom for the Galaxy without war. He has been remarkably lucky in how few losses he’s suffered since the start of this. He, at least, has suffered no Alderaans. 

And Luke, well, Luke is here for all the same reasons Wedge is. Luke knows the dangers as well as anyone — has lived the terror in far greater detail than anyone ever should. Wedge has to keep reminding himself that Luke is a special case, that more so than anyone in the Rebellion, Luke has certain advantages. Even without the rigorous training most of the Old Republic Jedi got, Luke still obviously has the Force on his side, giving him just that bit more protection. 

So really, despite the thrumming in his chest and the churning in his stomach, he needs to let it go. Luke can take care of himself. 

Wes is babbling as they circle around the next tumbling walker, so much so that he almost misses Luke’s voice breaking through the comm channel. 

He’s saying something about returning to Echo Base, about getting back into the fighters, and Wedge prays Janson’s picking up on this because all his brain is able to process right now is that Luke’s safe. 

Wedge slams the speeder into the icy floor of the loading dock, jumping out of it before it comes to a complete stop. The ground teams have been ordered to evacuate, so it’s up to the pilots to prep their x-wings and get the hell out. 

Luke makes it in a few minutes after he and Janson do, when Wedge is elbow deep in hull sealant, and desperate to block the blaring evacuation siren from his head. 

He looks dazed — Wedge realises it sounds silly to say that given everything they’ve gone through in the last thirty hours, but Luke is a creature of adrenaline and it takes a tremendous amount to break his stride. 

_Stay focused_ , he cautions himself when he clocks how long he’s been staring in Luke’s direction. He drops into his cockpit, speed-runs his pre-flight checks, and is hauling out of the hangar before his R4 unit has even had the chance to beep hello. 

“I’ll see you at Haven, Red Leader,” he says into the comms system, and then guns it through the Empire’s first line of aerial offence. Every inch of him aches, and he’s certain that each kilometre of altitude he gains in this thing is ripping his internal organs to shreds even more, but he’s run out of options and time. He’ll get the likely major damage patched up at Haven, now is the moment for survival. 

Behind him, his sensors clock another x-wing climbing at the same ludicrously dangerous trajectory — he doesn’t need visual confirmation to know who it is. Luke, it could only be Luke. 

Wedge tapers his climb, waiting for Luke to leapfrog him and take the lead. Luke spins them through some remarkably unconvincing gaps between cruisers, dodging a spiralling Tie as the blue fades into the black. And then they’re out, putting the Imperial fleet behind them, faced only with millions of kilometres of vast, empty space. 

He hadn’t noticed the cacophony of battle until it had disappeared, and now the only sound (besides the quiet purring of his engine) is the ringing silence in his ears and his ragged, agonising breaths. It’s just him and the void now.

He punches in Haven’s coordinates, hands trembling from adrenaline and pain, thinking only of how nice it’s going to be to medicate himself into oblivion when he rendezvous with the surviving remnants of the fleet. The stars speed up around him, the unnerving silence of space crossfading into the gentle hum of hyperspace, and just like that he’s off, hurtling towards the farthest reaches of the galaxy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Haven](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Haven_\(rendezvous_point\))


End file.
